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DIVINE IMMANENCE 



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DIVINE IMMANENCE 



%n lEgsag on 

THE SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE 
OF MATTER 



BY 



J. R. ILLINGWORTH, M.A. 

n 

AUTHOR OF ' PERSONALITY. HUMAN AND DIVINE ' 



OIov yap eKaarov icrn 7-775 yevicreais Te\ecr6eL(T7)S, tclvtyjv 
<j>afi€v tt)v cf>v<riv elvai iKaarov. 

— Arist. Pol. 



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1898 

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PREFACE 

Much of the best philosophical writing in 
England, of late years, has been critical, or, in 
the technical and proper sense of the word, 
sceptical. But critical and sceptical phases, 
in the progress of thought, can never, from 
their very nature, be other than temporary 
things : they sift and question the construc- 
tions of the past, but only with a view to pre- 
pare for those that are to come. For the 
world, after all, is a fact; sun, moon, and stars 
are real ; men and women live and love ; the 
moral law is strong ; — in a word, the universe 
exists, and some positive account of it must 
needs be true ; it can never be finally explained 
by a negation. Hence the result of recent 
criticism has been to make the need of recon- 
struction more apparent; and men are conse- 
quently feeling, in various directions, after 
positive, synthetic ways of thought. 

The following brief essay is not an attempt 



VI PREFACE 

to make any new or original contribution toward 
such thought : but it is written in the interest of 
synthesis, and aims at combining some ideas, 
which are familiar enough in themselves, but 
are not always viewed in combination — ideas 
on the relation of nature to religion. For one 
love, amid all our discord, unites the modern 
world; we all of us love nature in our several 
ways ; men of science, poets, painters, men of 
religion, men of affairs, are equally affected 
by its spell — the wonder of its processes, the 
glory of its aspect, the contrast of its calmness 
to the coil of human care. And with this 
feeling for nature — which, we are probably 
right in supposing, was never so widely dif- 
fused as at the present day — comes an in- 
creased susceptibility to those spiritual emotions 
which the presence of nature inspires, and 
which lie at the root of what we call natural 
religion. The sense of natural religion is there- 
fore strong in the modern mind; and this of 
itself is an important step towards positive, 
constructive belief. But we, of later ages, for 
whom history has happened, can never again 
revert to a mere religion of nature, any more 
than to a state of nature, in society, or policy, 



PREFACE Vll 

or morals. For we have learned, from nature 
itself, that the law of life is evolution, and 
that evolution means an increase of distinctive 
form. Religion, like all other things, must 
have become, as in fact it has become, in- 
creasingly articulate with the process of the 
years ; its development more definite, or, in 
religious language, its revelation more precise. 
And the plea of this essay is that the Incarna- 
tion is the congruous climax of such develop- 
ment ; that the more we analyze natural religion, 
the more it tends to such an issue ; while con- 
versely the Incarnation presupposes such a past. 
This is no more, of course, than theologians, in 
all ages, have maintained ; and to many readers, 
therefore, it may seem a commonplace. But 
its restatement will, perhaps, be permitted for 
the benefit of those who are more attracted by 
the question than acquainted with its history, 
in the hope that some who, under modern in- 
fluence, have felt the fascination of natural 
religion, may be led to recognize its culmination 
in the Christian creed. 

As this essay is in some sense a sequel to 
my lectures on 'Personality' — being a further 



Vlll PREFACE 

application of the same line of thought — I 
have here assumed certain positions, which are 
there defended at length ; and at the same time 
enlarged upon certain others — more especially 
in the Appendix — which seemed, in their present 
connexion, to need further emphasis. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 

MATTER AND SPIRIT 

PAGE 

I. The distinction between matter and spirit 
dates from the ' body and soul ' of primitive 
philosophy 2 

Matter and spirit, however different, are only 

known in combination .... 2 

Therefore neither can be completely known . 5 

But they represent very distinct and distin- 
guishable phases of experience ... 6 

For spirit is what thinks, and wills, and loves ; 

matter is what moves in space . . . 10 

II. While matter is of use to spirit, spirit is of no 

use to matter . . . . . . 11 

Illustrations of this fact 1 1-14 

This suggests a teleological relation between 

the two ; i. e. that 
Spirit is the final cause of matter . . .15-17 
Bacon and Spinoza criticize final causes . . 17 
But (1) Bacon's objection is only to their 

misuse . . . . . 18 

ix 



X CONTENTS 

PAGE 

(2) Spinoza's objection involves an im- 
possible separation between man 
and the universe .... 20 

III. Spiritual intensity, in human judgement, out- 
weighs material immensity .... 21-22 
And thereby justifies its right to subordinate 

the latter to itself 23-25 

CHAPTER II 

THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 

Among the uses of matter to spirit its religious 

influence is the chief ...... 26-27 

Historical illustrations of this. 
I . Ancient literature : — 

Egyptian hymns ..... 28-30 

The Vedas ...... 31-33 

Zend Avesta 34~35 

The Hebrew Psalms .... 36-37 

II. Greek and Roman literature : — 

Poets 38-39 

Philosophers . . . . . . 39-40 

III. Christian literature : — 

Fathers 41-44 

Mediaeval writers 45 

IV. The Renaissance : — 

Campanella 46-47 

Petrarch 47-48 



CONTENTS xi 

PAGE 

V. Later Theologians : — 

Suso . 48-49 

Zwingli ....... 50 

Feiielon 51 

W. Law 52 

VI . Modern literature : — 

Shelley 53 

Byron 54-55 

Wordsworth 5 5-56 

These illustrations are typical of innumerable 
others, and evince a mystic emotion more 
fundamental than any varieties of creed . . 56-57 

CHAPTER III 

DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 

The religious influence of external nature is a fact 
of greater magnitude than any one of its inter- 
pretations 58-59 

This fact points to a spiritual reality behind things ; 
unless 

(1) It is an illusion 59 

(2) The faculties which feel it are untrust- 

worthy ...... 60 

The suggestion that it may be an illusion raises 

the question, What do we mean by reality ? . 60 
We find on reflection, that we cannot mean ' exist- 
ence in space,' but permanent relation to per- 
sonality 60-66 



Xll CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Judged by this criterion, the sensible is quite as 
real as the scientific aspect of the world; the 
two things impressing different faculties in us, 
but with equal justification 66-67 

The objection that feeling is less trustworthy than 
reason, ignores the fact that they are co-ordinate 
elements of the selfsame personal experience ; 
and that the influence in question is not merely 
emotionally, but personally felt .... 67-73 

But if this influence cannot be discredited, it points 

to a spiritual presence in nature .... 73-76 

The relation of this spirit to nature can only be 
interpreted on the analogy of human personality 
(for we know no other) 77 

Human Personality combines : — 

(1) Transcendence of matter 77 

(2) Immanence in matter .... 80 
This analogy therefore excludes : — 

(1) Pantheism (mere immanence) . . 82 

(2) Deism (mere transcendence) . . 82 

(3) Monism (mere identity) ... 83 
While it harmonizes with Trinitarianism . . 86 

CHAPTER IV 

DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 

If God is immanent in nature, He must be imma- 
nent in man (as being part of nature) . . 88 
Evidence of this in conscience ... 89 
Evidence of this in inspiration ... 90 



CONTENTS xin 

PAGE 

This points to the Incarnation as its climax . . 91 
I. The tendency to believe in incarnations is 
urged as an argument against the truth of 
the Incarnation ...... 92 

But this only holds good if an incarnation is 
antecedently improbable .... 93 

Otherwise it points in the opposite direction . 95 

II. Again, the Incarnation is thought improbable 

because miraculous ..... 97 
But being ex hypothesi an unique event, it is 
not ( miraculous' in the sense of the objection 97-103 

III. The primary evidence for the Incarnation is 

spiritual ; being the self-revelation of a Per- 
son 103-104 

It then rather supports its accompanying mir- 
acles, than they it ... 105-107 

While the lapse of time, which weakens the 
weight of miracles, strengthens that of 
prophecy 108-109 

IV. Moreover, the Incarnation is redemptive, its 

object being to restore a law already 

broken 110-113 

And this fact must affect our view of its 
miracles : — 

(1) The Virgin birth . . . 113-115 

(2) The miracles of healing . . 11 5-1 16 

(3) The cosmic miracles . . . 11 6-1 17 

(4) The Resurrection . . . 118-119 



XIV CONTENTS 

CHAPTER V 

THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 

PAGE 

The objection to miracles is chiefly based on the 

uniformity of nature. Mozley's answer to this 1 20-1 21 
But we now think more of the i unity, 1 than the ' uni- 
formity ' of nature . . . . . .122 

And this is a spiritual conception . . . .123 

But spirit asserts its own superiority to matter . 125 
The analysis of our conception of causation points 

in the same direction 126-131 

Dr. Newman on the superiority of moral to physical 

law ^3 I ~ I 33 

Personal experience is the root of all knowledge . 133 
And this reveals the moral law, whose claim to su- 
premacy justifies miracles 134 

Lotze on the relation of the 'absolute' to matter 135-137 
The Incarnation has a cosmic, as well as a human 

significance, and its miracles harmonize with this 1 37-140 
The general cessation of miracles was as needful as 

their occurrence 141-144 

But they have assisted to emphasize the belief in 
particular providence, which is their modern ana- 
logue 144-148 

CHAPTER VI 

THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS 

Matter has a secondary as well as a primary con- 
nexion with religion, due to the reaction upon it 
of the human mind 149-152 



CONTENTS xv 

PAGE 

For primitive man inevitably associates 

(i) his gods with particular places . . 153 

(2) and his service of them with particular 

rites 154 

(3) Illustrations of this . . . 155 
But wherever an omnipresent God is specially real- 
ized, He specially is 1 56-1 5 7 

The Incarnation sanctions and spiritualizes this 
principle — 

(1) Christ's attitude toward the body . 159 

(2) His attitude towards nature . . 160 

(3) His symbolic teaching . . . 161 

(4) His symbolic action . . . .162 
Matter is utilized but subordinated to spirit through- 
out 163 

The same principle runs through Christian history — 

(1) In the treatment of the human body 164-166 

(2) In the sacramental system . . 166-171 

(3) In art i7i" I 74 

Hence the religious influence of art and sacrament 

is as real as that of material nature, which they 
emphasize and intensify .... 174-179 

CHAPTER VII 

THE INCARNATION AND THE TRINITY 

The doctrine of the Incarnation (with that of the 
Trinity which it involves), though philosophical 
in aspect, was essentially practical in origin 180-183 



xvi CONTENTS 

PAGE 

For the purport of the Incarnation was to reveal 
God as love ; and this would have been unin- 
telligible without the revelation of a plurality of 
Persons in the Godhead, between whom love 
exists 183-187 

And the object of this revelation was to influence 
human life in the only way in which it can be 
completely influenced : i. e. by love . . 187-190 

But deeds are more than words of love ; hence the 
revelation appropriately began with the actual 
life of Christ 191-192 

And the practical power of this life reflects retro- 
spective light upon the metaphysical doctrines 
which it involves 193 

And is thus the strongest evidence of their truth 194-197 

APPENDIX 

I. Personal Identity 199 

II. Freewill 227 



DIVINE IMMANENCE 

CHAPTER I 

MATTER AND SPIRIT 

THE nature of the relation between spirit 
and matter may perhaps be thought too 
abstruse a problem to be of general interest. 
Yet it is a question which lies at the root of all 
our different theories of life ; of our art, of our 
moral conduct, of our religion or irreligion ; of 
the gloom that darkens, or the hope that glorifies 
the sunset of our days. We all have opinions of 
one kind or another on the point, and it deeply 
concerns us, seeing the nature of the issues they 
involve, that those opinions should, if possible, 
be true. 

The subject is not therefore really unprac- 
tical, or remote from common interest ; and, as 
it has been much discussed of recent years, for 
various reasons, and from various points of 
view, no apology will perhaps be needed for 
one more recurrence to the question, in its bear- 
ing on religious life and thought. 



2 MATTER AND SPIRIT [chap. 

Body and soul is a distinction which dates 
from primitive philosophy ; we find it, in crude 
conception, among the earliest and rudest races ; 
whether drawn from the visions of dreamland 
or elsewhere. And with the progress of reflec- 
tion this distinction gradually passed, after much 
sifting and refinement by successive schools of 
thought, into the more complete and compre- 
hensive antithesis, between what we now call 
spirit and matter. 

Now the first thing to notice about spirit and 
matter is that, however we regard them, — 
whether as totally different things, or as differ- 
ent aspects of the same thing, — we only know 
them as a fact in combination. 

First, there is the material world outside us, 
earth, sea, sky, and sun, and stars ; the manifold 
movement of its processes, the life with which 
it teems, the beauty of its aspect, the music of 
its sounds. It existed before we were born — 
this solid universe of things — and will continue 
to exist when we are gone. We cannot easily 
be brought to regard it as in any way dependent 
upon ourselves, and we are always ready to 
'vanquish Berkeley with a grin.' Yet a little 
reflection will convince us that our knowledge 



I] MATTER AND SPIRIT 3 

of the world is largely qualified and coloured by 
the constitution of our mind. The mind receives 
its information, to begin with, from the senses, 
and the impressions of sense are very different 
from the things which they reflect. The hues 
of the sunset and the rainbow, with all their 
power to move the soul, are due to movements 
among atoms to which we can ascribe no colour; 
and the musical sounds that seem to us so spirit- 
ual, flow from vibrations — merely mechanical 
vibrations — of the air. The same is the case 
with the other senses ; they only present us with 
effects. While scientific men assure us that even 
sensitive perception is by no means so simple a 
process as it seems, and involves acts° of combi- 
nation, and comparison, and inference which, 
however instinctively performed, are in their 
nature intellectual. And when we pass from 
simple to complex perceptions, this action of 
the mind becomes quite obvious. In looking at 
a landscape, for instance, we see more than a 
parti-coloured panorama, which is, of course, all 
that is reflected in the eye : we distinguish and 
recognize its features, trees, flowers, houses, 
cattle, birds ; and this implies previous know- 
ledge, and memory, and thought ; we interpret 



4 MATTER AND SPIRIT [chap. 

what we see, and though custom has made the 
process automatic, it is none the less of mental 
origin. The primary aspect of the world there- 
fore does not show us matter by itself, but matter 
as it affects our mind, in a particular way, 
through the senses, and is at the same moment 
affected in particular ways by our mind. Nor 
does science alter the case. Science indeed 
penetrates behind this primary aspect of the 
world, and presents us with a different picture. 
It discovers the machinery by which the scenic 
effect is produced; atoms, energy, ether, and 
the laws which they obey, or in other words the 
ways in which they act. But all this brings us 
no nearer to the knowledge of matter by itself. 
On the contrary, it lands us in a region of 
theories, hypotheses, ideas, which, however true 
we may believe them to be, are not material but 
mental. Thus matter, as we know it, is every- 
where and always fused with mind : and in the 
nature of the case it always must be so ; for 'to 
know a thing,' of course, means to bring it into 
relation to our mind ; and our mind, as we have 
seen, is not a mirror which passively reflects, but 
an agent which helps to constitute the object of 
its ken. 



i] MATTER AND SPIRIT 5 

The case is the same when we turn to spirit, 
for that also, as we know it, is always connected 
with matter. Not only do we depend on the 
senses, which are material things, to awaken 
our intelligence, and feeling, and will; but we 
cannot think at all, we cannot be conscious, 
without a brain, changes in which accompany 
our every change of thought. 

The fact, indeed, that we are unaware of the 
movements taking place in our brain, may 
sometimes mislead us into speaking of purely 
spiritual experience ; but no experience, how- 
ever spiritual, can be other than a state of con- 
sciousness, and therefore of the material organ 
upon which consciousness depends. 

But if matter and spirit are thus only known 
in combination, it follows that neither can be 
completely known ; since we cannot disentangle 
their respective contributions to the joint result 
which we call 'experience.' Hence it is that 
every possible shade of opinion has existed on 
the relationship between the two ; from the 
view that regards mind as a passing harmony 
of matter, to the view that regards matter as a 
dream of mind. What we actually know, at 
first hand, is our personal experience, in which 



6 MATTER AND SPIRIT [chap. 

the two factors are inextricably combined ; and 
directly we go beyond this to speak of matter 
or spirit by themselves, we are making abstrac- 
tion of one element from our concrete experi- 
ence, without any means of knowing whether 
such an abstraction can exist, except in the 
mind that makes it. It is, of course, logically 
possible that the two things may be indepen- 
dent and separable realities, as the natural dual- 
ists or natural realists believe; or that either 
may be a mere mode of the other, as idealism 
and materialism respectively maintain; or yet 
again, that the two may be co-ordinate aspects, 
or manifestations, or functions of one reality. 
The claims of this latter opinion have been 
revived of recent years under the name of 
monism ; but it should be remembered that 
monism is not really newer than any of the 
alternative conjectures ; they are all as old as 
philosophy, and remain conjectures still. 

But leaving conjecture for the present, and 
limiting our thoughts to what we know, we find 
that though we cannot in fact separate spirit 
and matter, yet the two words represent very 
distinct phases of our total experience; and 
phases which, whatever the nature of their 



I] MATTER AND SPIRIT 7 

ultimate connexion, are perfectly separable in 
thought. Thus the fundamental characteristic 
of spirit, as we know it in human personality, is 
self-consciousness, the power to make mental 
distinction between self and other things, and to 
regard all other things as objects over against 
our subjective self : while spiritual life consists 
in the free selection and conscious pursuit of 
the various objects of knowledge, affection, or 
practical endeavour which we are thus able to 
present to ourselves. Our action is thus deter- 
mined, in technical terms, by final causes ; that 
is, by causes which do not exercise a physical 
compulsion, but appeal to the mind as ends, 
aims, purposes, ideals, which we are free either 
to follow or refuse. Hence we are self-deter- 
mined ; since, from the objects that occur to us, 
we can choose the one which we shall make our 
own ; and as by successive acts of choice we 
gradually mould and shape our character, we 
are, in a measure, self-creative, causes of our- 
selves (caussae sui). This capacity of self- 
determination, and therefore of self-creation, 
compels us to place spirit in a rank by itself. 
Other things are determined from without ; they 
are what external forces make them ; they do 



8 MATTER AND SPIRIT [chap. 

not choose what they will be. But spirit 
chooses its own end, elects what it will become, 
and thereby asserts its existence, as having a 
value for itself. And a being which thus claims 
to exist for its own sake, and be its own end, 
thereby justifies its existence : it has in our eyes 
a right to exist, by the very fact of willing its 
own existence. It has, as we say, an absolute 
value compared with merely material things, 
whose reason for existence lies in their relation 
to other things outside themselves; like cogs 
in a wheel, links in a chain, fragments of a 
machine or picture that possess no meaning 
when detached from the whole. 

Regarded simply from a metaphysical point 
of view then, as self-conscious and self-deter- 
mined, spirit reigns in a realm apart. But of 
course it is much more than a metaphysical 
abstraction ; it is ethical and emotional as well. 
Its power of self-determination enables it to act 
from a sense of duty, to obey a moral law, and 
in so doing become good ; while its goodness 
finds highest expression in the life of self- 
sacrificing love which is only possible to a being 
that is both self-conscious and free, and which 
we recognize as the end of ends, the reality that 
needs no explanation. 



I] MATTER AND SPIRIT 9 

'For life, with all it yields, of joy and woe 
And hope and fear, — believe the aged friend, — 
Is just our chance of the prize of learning love, 
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is.' 1 

Then as to matter : what do we know of it ? 
The term is often used as if it implied some 
common stuff, of which individual things are 
made. But no analysis has yet been able to 
detect such a common stuff. On the contrary, 
we find a number of primitive elements, which 
recent science, instead of diminishing, has con- 
siderably increased. Matter is the sum total of 
all these elements, regarded as * possessing" a 
particular attribute, namely materiality, or the 
property of occupying space : while, as all the 
occupants of space are in motion, molecular or 
molar, occupation of space may be said to be 
practically synonymous with movement in space. 
Matter then is the name for what moves in 
space. It is at present believed to consist of 
atoms which have different chemical character- 
istics, that may possibly be due to different 
mechanical arrangements; but here we pass 
into the region of hypothesis, and beyond this 
all is hypothetical as to what atoms ultimately 

1 Browning, A Death in the Desert. 



IO MATTER AND SPIRIT [chap. 

are. At any rate, their ultimate constitution is 
out of reach of our senses ; and it remains that 
matter as we know it is an effect, a phenomenon 
or appearance, a manifestation of something 
other than meets either hand or eye. 

Briefly then spirit is what thinks and wills 
and loves ; and matter is what moves in space : 
and whatever their ultimate relationship may 
be, we may fairly speak of two things whose 
modes of manifestation are so different, as for 
practical purposes two different things. Adopt- 
ing this use of language then, the next fact 
which we wish to note is that, while matter is 
of use to spirit, spirit is of no use to matter. 

One might, of course, put the case in a more 
general form, by substituting 'consciousness' 
for ' spirit,' and saying that, while matter is of 
use to consciousness, consciousness is of no use 
to matter; thus including in the statement 
every form of conscious life, from the lowest 
sensitive organism upward. But what is true, 
in its measure, of all conscious life, is true in a 
much more eminent degree of spirit. And, as 
spirit is the thing with which we are dealing, 
we will confine our attention to that, merely 
remarking that the same line of thought admits 
of this wider application. 



I] MATTER AND SPIRIT II 

While then matter is of use — incessant and 
inevitable use — to spirit, spirit, on the other 
hand, is of no use to matter. Man can improve 
material things, of course, from his own point 
of view, by employing them for purposes of 
science or of art ; but in so doing, he only alters 
their relation to himself ; he does not and can- 
not change their nature. Electricity gains 
nothing by guidance along wires; marble re- 
mains marble, as much in the statue as in the 
rock ; gold is no better for coinage, nor flowers 
for cultivation, except in their relationship to 
man. Human interference does not anywise 
affect, either the constitution of natural ele- 
ments, or the action of natural laws. 

But reverse the picture, and the opposite is 
the case. Our every state of consciousness 
depends, as we have seen, upon the brain, and 
therefore upon the blood that nourishes the 
brain, and therefore on the chemical elements 
that form the blood. Without oxygen, and 
nitrogen, and phosphorus, and carbon, we 
could neither think, nor will, nor love. 

But thought and will and love must needs 
communicate themselves to others ; spirit craves 
intercourse with spirit; and here again we 



12 MATTER AND SPIRIT [chap. 

depend on matter. Tongue and ear are 
material things ; words are movements of the 
air; and printing press and telegraph extend 
their sway. Machinery again, with its coal, 
and steam, and iron, is ever at work to enlarge 
the practical dominion of our will ; while art — 
art takes up the stubborn elements of earth and 
transmutes them in its crucible to spiritual 
things. Hellenic sculptures, Gothic cathedrals, 
mediaeval painting, modern music, are only 
modes of matter, when regarded by themselves : 
yet through them the soul of man has given 
utterance and permanence to all the varying 
phases of his inward spiritual story, which else 
would have been fugitive and dumb. 

Further, to give expression to a thing is to 
realize it, in the sense of making it more real ; 
and hence matter, as being the language of 
spirit, is also the medium of its realization. 
Thoughts float idly across the mind, till they 
have been precipitated in print; theories re- 
main abstract and uncertain, till they have 
been tested by experiment; good intentions 
are of no avail, till they have faced the resist- 
ance of the outer world, and in overcoming its 
opposition become moral acts ; and love can 



i] MATTER AND SPIRIT 13 

never rest, till it has proved its own intensity 
by a thousand tender, thoughtful, self-sacrific- 
ing deeds. In every case contact with matter 
strengthens the spiritual fibre, forcing vague- 
ness into outline, confusion into clearness, doubt 
into decision, hesitation into act. It is the nec- 
essary means by which our spiritual life becomes 
actual, concrete, real. Nor is it only as a means 
of expression that matter ministers to spirit. It 
has also an important reaction upon character 
and conduct. 

'The floating clouds their state shall lend 
To her ; for her the willow bend ; 
Nor shall she fail to see 
Even in the motions of the storm 
Grace that shall mould the maiden's form 
By silent sympathy. 

1 The stars of midnight shall be dear 
To her ; and she shall lean her ear 
In many a secret place 
Where rivulets dance their wayward round, 
And beauty born of murmuring sound 
Shall pass into her face.' 1 

This is more than a poet's conceit. It is a 
description of what happens daily, and in more 

1 Wordsworth, ' Three years she grew.' 



14 MATTER AND SPIRIT [chap. 

ways than most men are aware; the gradual 
moulding of our thoughts and feelings, our 
habitual expression, our face and form, by subtle 
influence of outward things. Plato first called 
attention to this principle, and it has been called 
from him, platonic. But all great thinkers have 
recognized its action, from Plato to the present 
day. None more so than Browning. Has a 
man reasoned himself into unbelief? Then — 

' Just when we're safest 
There's a sunset touch, a fancy from 
A flower bell,' 1 

and the reasoning fades away. Have the souls 
of two lovers been melted into one? 

' The forests had done it ; there they stood ; 
We caught for a moment the powers at play : 
They had mingled us so for once and good, 
Their work was done.' 2 

Have two others missed their mutual vocation? 
They have profaned in so doing a natural sacra- 
ment, which 'made things plain in vain.' 

What was the sea for? What, the grey, 
Sad church, that solitary day, 

1 Browning, Bishop Blougratri's Apology. 

2 Id. By the Fireside. 



I] MATTER AND SPIRIT 15 

Crosses and graves and swallow's call? 

Was there naught better than to enjoy? 

No feat which, done, would make time break 

And let us pent-up creatures through 

Into eternity, our due? 

No forcing earth teach heaven's employ ? ' 1 

Nor are such things exceptional ; they are 
common situations of every day, and must have 
recurred, since primaeval man first wove his 
legends of the dawn ; matter everywhere and 
always, fashioning, inspiring, controlling, quick- 
ening, the processes of spiritual life. 

Here then we are face to face with plain a fact 
of experience. Throughout the entire range of 
their co-existent activity, matter subserves spirit, 
and that not in one way only, but in a variety of 
subtle, and delicate, and complex ways; while 
in the opposite direction, nothing of the kind 
takes place. 

When therefore we find that the material 
world, which can derive, as we have already 
seen, no possible benefit from spirit, is in count- 
less ways adapted to further spiritual life, it is 
hard to resist the conclusion that matter exists 
for this very end, and that all its ingenuity of 

1 Browning, Dis Aliter Visum, 



16 MATTER AND SPIRIT [chap. 

intricate arrangement is meant to serve the 
purpose, which in fact it so elaborately serves. 
If matter lay at our feet, as a thing to be em- 
ployed or neglected at will, the case would be 
different ; and we might then regard its use as 
accidental. But its fusion with spirit is, in fact, 
far too intimate, its correlation too exact to admit 
of any such idea. It is obviously part and par- 
cel of the same system with spirit; and if so 
must, we argue, be qualified throughout by the 
final causality which is spirit's goal. 

' Since, in the seeing soul, all worth lies, I assert, — 
And naught i' the world, which, save for soul that 

sees, inert 
Was, is, and would be ever, — stuff for transmuting, — 

null 
And void until man's breath evoke the beautiful.' ! 

The case may, for the sake of emphasis, be 
re-stated thus. We attribute an absolute worth 
and dignity to spirit, simply because it possesses 
the power of purpose, purposeful thought, pur- 
poseful action, purposeful love. Purpose is our 
standard, our inevitable standard of value; not 
this or that particular purpose, which may be 

1 Browning, Fifinc at the Fair, 55. 



I] MATTER AND SPIRIT 17 

useful to ourselves, but purpose as such, the free 
determination to realize a foreseen end. Our 
mental constitution compels us to attribute this 
importance to the power of purpose ; or, to put 
it otherwise, our reason justifies us in so doing. 
Now this does not merely mean that we prefer 
things which have a purpose to things which 
have none. It means that purpose, when once 
recognized, becomes the necessary and self-evi- 
dent key to existence ; the final category, or 
form of thought, under which we are compelled 
to regard the world. For a system which cul- 
minates in purpose must be purposeful through- 
out. Its entire process must be qualified by 
the character of its conclusion. And hence 
the material order which is so marvellously 
ministrant to spirit must, we conclude, be 
intended so to be. Spirit must be its final 
cause. 

There is of course a prejudice, in many 
minds, against all consideration of final causes; 
which Bacon calls 'anthropomorphic concep- 
tions, rather than cosmic realities ' (ex analogia 
hominis magis quant universi), and Spinoza, 
4 mere figments of the human brain ' {nihil nisi 
humana figmentd). But what really provoked 



1 8 MATTER AND SPIRIT [chap. 

this criticism was the frivolous and futile tele- 
ology, which substituted the thought of final 
for that of physical causation; leading men to 
think they knew enough about a thing, when 
they knew its presumed purpose — often a very 
credulously and crudely presumed purpose — 
and to neglect all further inquiry into its pro- 
cess of production, that is to say, all interest in 
physical science. But Bacon fully admits, else- 
where, that ' final causes have their place ' : 
and as the subject is important and his author- 
ity has weight, it may be worth while to quote 
him at length. 

1 For to say that the hairs of the eye-lids are 
for a quickset and fence about the sight ; or that 
the firmness of the skins and hides of living 
creatures is to defend them from the extremities 
of heat or cold; or that the bones are for the 
colum?is or beams, whereupon the frames of the 
bodies of living creatures are built ; or that 
the leaves of trees are for protecting of the fruit ; 
or that the clouds are for watering of the earth ; 
or that the solidness of the earth is for the sta- 
tion and mansion of living creatures and the 
like, is well inquired and collected in meta- 



I] MATTER AND SPIRIT 19 

physique, but in physique they are impertinent. 
. . . Not because those final causes are not 
true, and worthy to be inquired, being kept 
within their own province; but because their 
excursions into the limits of physical causes 
hath bred a vastness and solitude in that track. 
For otherwise, keeping their precincts and 
borders, men are extremely deceived if they 
think there is an enmity or repugnancy at all 
between them . . . both causes being true and 
compatible, the one declaring an intention^ the 
other a consequence only. Neither doth this 
call in question, or derogate from Divine Provi- 
dence, but highly confirm and exalt it. For as 
in civil actions he is the greater and deeper 
politique, that can make other men the instru- 
ments of his will and ends, and yet never 
acquaint them with his purpose, so as they shall 
do it and yet not know what they do, than he 
that imparteth his meaning to those he em- 
ployeth; so is the wisdom of God more admir- 
able, when nature intendeth one thing, and 
Providence draweth forth another, than if He 
had communicated to particular creatures and 
motions the characters and impressions of His 
Providence.' 



20 MATTER AND SPIRIT [chap. 

Spinoza's objection is more thorough-going, 
but rests upon an impossible separation between 
man and the universe. For a universe, apart 
from and in contrast with the mind that knows 
it, is a mere creature of the imagination, which 
cannot be construed into thought; an utterly- 
unthinkable, meaningless abstraction ; while a 
universe that is known to mind must be known 
in subjection to the laws of mind, among which 
is the teleological principle. But Spinoza's im- 
aginative picture, for all its philosophic impossi- 
bility, has been widely influential, during the 
last two centuries, through the emphasis it has 
given to the contrast, so congenial to a scientific 
age, between the grandeur of the material uni- 
verse, and the insignificance of man. It is im- 
portant therefore to notice that such a contrast 
is entirely fallacious, and merely arises from the 
fact that we see the magnitude of matter, but 
cannot see the magnitude of mind. To gain a 
truer view of their relative proportions, we must 
begin by confining our attention to the earth, 
as the only field where we know the two in cor- 
relation. For the rest of the stellar universe we 
see only on its material side ; and while all 
analogy leads us to infer that this must have a 



I] MATTER AND SPIRIT 21 

spiritual counterpart, we know nothing of its 
existence, nature, or extent ; and discussion of 
the subject is therefore utterly inpossible. 

When we confine our view to the earth, then, 
it looms large, when compared with its inhabi- 
tants, and endures while their successive genera- 
tions pass away. But if intensity, rather than 
extension, be, as we cannot help believing, the 
true measure and criterion of worth, a single 
human spirit far outsoars material things. What 
then of the millions upon millions now inhabit- 
ing the earth ? and what of all the generations 
that have passed away, or are to come ? Surely, 
in mere number, and much more when measured 
by their souls' immensity, they form an aggre- 
gate which dwarfs to nothingness the size of 
their temporary home ; while if, after all, they 
should prove immortal, the relative permanence 
of earthly things will be an illusion — a mere 
optical illusion. 

We will return therefore, without further 
apology, to the conclusion that we had reached, 
the conclusion that matter exists for the sake 
of spirit. Some such assumption, indeed, has 
always been implicitly present in the popular 
mind; but our contention is that this assump- 



22 MATTER AND SPIRIT [chap. 

tion, like many another of the implicit convic- 
tions of common sense, has a strong metaphysi- 
cal foundation, in the necessities of human 
thought ; though for the sake of those who are 
either sceptical or shy of metaphysic, it will suf- 
fice to say that it has at least serious probability 
in its favour. 

The statement that matter exists for the sake 
of spirit is, it will be noticed, a general formula. 
It does not imply either that we can trace the 
utility of every material phenomenon, or that 
we need suppose every material phenomenon 
to be subservient to human use : it merely 
asserts that, within the field of our experience, 
there is a constant order of relation between the 
two, which is never reversed ; and which justi- 
fies the judgement in point. But as we finite 
beings who use matter, and find it so adapted 
to our use, have no share in its original produc- 
tion or control of its general course, we infer 
that it must be guided by a spiritual Being, of 
commensurate capacity and will ; while further 
light must of necessity be thrown upon the 
character of this Being, by the nature of the 
spiritual purpose which He enables matter to 
subserve. 



i] MATTER AND SPIRIT 23 

This is not, it should be noticed, the form of 
teleology, or argument from design, which relies 
upon detailed cases of adaptation within the 
material region, and which has been attacked 
of late years on the ground that the adaptations 
in question may be only the survivals of many 
failures. The attack indeed has been ade- 
quately answered, but with that we are not 
now concerned. What we are here contend- 
ing is that the entire material order, with all 
its infinite complexity, ministers to another and 
a higher order of being, from which it receives 
no reciprocal return, and is therefore intended 
or designed so to do; and it is in the width 
and variety of these ministrations that the 
strength of the argument consists. This may 
be called the higher teleology ; and while it im- 
mensely strengthens the probability of design 
within the material order itself, is unaffected by 
objections from the material side. It can only 
be met, as we have seen, by denying the vera- 
city of our faculties. Man, from the dawn of 
history, has asked why ? as well as how ? why 
am I ? and why is the world ? as well as how 
came it all to be ? And as long as he refuses 
to be satisfied without an answer to that 



24 MATTER AND SPIRIT [chap. 

Why? he remains an unconscious metaphysi- 
cian, a believer in final causation. When we 
are complacently told in certain quarters that 
the Copernican astronomy revolutionized man's 
view of his relation to the universe, we should 
remember that, to say the least, this is a con- 
siderable overstatement of the case. In minds 
of a materialistic bias, it would undoubtedly 
have this effect ; but not in those who esti- 
mated man by the claims of his spiritual nature, 
which is as unaffected by the size of his dwell- 
ing-place as by the cubits of his stature. And 
what Copernicus did for space, modern science 
has done for time. It has dwarfed the spirit- 
ual history of man by comparison with the 
infinitude of ages, during which the material 
system that he inhabits was evolved. But still 
it is true that spirit thinks, and wills, and loves, 
while matter only moves in space; and man's 
judgement of their relative importance, there- 
fore, remains what it was before. 

In conclusion, it should be noticed that if 
there is truth in the foregoing remarks, it is 
absolutely unaffected by any theory which we 
may adopt, as to the ultimate nature of matter ; 
for it deals with the relations between matter 



I] MATTER AND SPIRIT 25 

and spirit as we know them, and is as compati- 
ble with the most realistic conceptions of matter, 
as with those more sublimated views of it, to 
which some modern thinkers seem disposed to 
return. 



CHAPTER II 

THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE OF THE MATERIAL 
WORLD 

AMONG the various uses of matter to spirit, 
which we have mentioned in the preced- 
ing chapter, one of the most striking through- 
out all history has been its religious use, the 
part which it has played by its mere aspect, or 
by obvious inference from its aspect, in awak- 
ening and sustaining religious ideas. 

Sun-myths, star-myths, storm-myths, myths 
of the mountains, and the rivers, and the 
trees, lie at the root, as we now know so well, 
of all early religion. And when with the prog- 
ress of reflection these myths were criticized 
and sifted, man still found in the grandeur, the 
harmony, the beauty, the marvellous mechan- 
ism, the exuberant life, the exquisite adaptations 
of the natural world, evidence of the existence 
and character of God; evidence which, what- 
ever may be urged against its value, has, as a 
26 



RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE OF MATERIAL WORLD 27 

simple fact of history, weighed with man in 
every age. Nor has all our modern enlighten- 
ment materially altered our case. We have 
long outgrown mythology, and are intolerant 
of doubtful logic ; but the religious influence of 
external nature is as strong upon us as it ever 
was, possibly even stronger than in some by- 
gone times. For the strength of the influence 
in question is emotional rather than intellectual, 
and consists in a sense of nearness or commun- 
ion, of one kind or another, with the divine. 
And though this admits of intellectual analysis, 
and can be fashioned into argument, it is the 
sense of experience in the background which 
gives the argument its force. 

Now this is a fact of greater significance 
than is commonly supposed ; and to estimate it 
duly we must endeavour to form a mental pict- 
ure of the scale on which the influence in 
question has obtained. Though, therefore, it 
may almost seem like offering a brick, as an 
adequate specimen of a house, we will quote a 
few passages bearing on the subject: the point 
to notice in them being the fact that in all ages 
of the world, and under every variety of culture, 
and of creed, nature — material nature — the 



28 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [chap. 

course and aspect of the outer world has been 
an influence, and a main influence, making for 
religion. 

To begin with what Egyptologists assure us 
is the oldest poem in the world, the 1 5th chap- 
ter of the Book of the Dead contains a hymn 
to the rising and setting sun : — 

' Hail to thee, Ra, the self -existent. . . . 
Glorious is thine uprising from the horizon. 
Both worlds are illumined by thy rays. All 
the gods rejoice to see the king of heaven . . . 
all men rejoice to see thee marching in thy 
mystery towards them . . . thee who art given 
anew to them every morning . . . thy splen- 
dour is beyond compare ... it has all the 
colours of Arabia. . . . Hail to thee who mak- 
est glad the lands, and all their towns and 
temples with the blessings of thy goodness . . . 
thou who bringest forth food and sweet nourish- 
ment. . . . Hail to thee, Ra, when thou re- 
turnest home in renewed beauty, crowned, and 
almighty.' 1 

The same thoughts are expanded in a later 
hymn, which is still not later than the age of 
Moses : — 

1 Trans, from French of Lefebure. 



n] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 29 

' Praise to Amen-Ra : 

the good God beloved : 

giving life to all animated things : 

to all fair cattle : 

Maker of men, Creator of beasts : 

Lord of existences, Creator of fruitful trees : 

Maker of herbs, Feeder of cattle : 

Maker of things below and above, Enlightener of 

the earth : 
sailing in heaven in tranquillity : 

at whose pleasure the Nile overflows : 
Lord of mercy most loving : 
at whose coming men live : 
opener of every eye : 
proceeding from the firmament : 
causer of pleasure and light. 

thy love pervades the earth : 

maker of grass for the cattle : 

fruitful trees for men : 

causing the fish to live in the river : 

the birds to fill the air : 

giving breath to those in the egg : 

feeding the bird that flies : 

giving food to the bird that perches : 



30 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [chap. 

to the creeping thing and the flying thing equally : 
providing food for the rats in their holes : 
feeding the flying things in every tree. 
Hail to thee for all these things : 

homage to thee in all their voices : 

Hail to thee say all creatures : 

salutation to thee from every land : 

to the height of heaven, to the breadth of the earth : 

to the depths of the sea : 

the gods adore thy Majesty : 

the spirits thou hast created exalt (thee) : 

rejoicing before the feet of their begetter : 

they cry out welcome to thee : 

father of the fathers of all gods : 

who raises the heavens, who fixes the earth.' x 

It is a far cry from Egypt to the plains of 
India, both in distance and in race : yet in the 
Vedas, the earliest literature of our Indo-Euro- 
pean kindred, a similar note is struck. Their 
theology is for the most part polytheistic, pass- 
ing at times into pantheism ; but the spectacle 
of nature in its varying aspects of power, beauty, 
and beneficence, is the dominating motive of it 
all: — 

1 Records of the Past, ii. 129. 



ii] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 31 

'May the Earth and the Heaven hear us, 
the Water, the Sun with the stars, the wide 
Atmosphere.' 

' May Mitra, Varu/za, Aditi, Ocean, Earth, and 
Heaven gladden us.' 

* May Aditi, the mother of Mitra and the opu- 
lent Varu;*a, preserve us from every calamity.' 

1 Aditi is the sky ; Aditi is the air ; . . . Aditi 
is all the gods.' 

' Neither heavens nor atmospheres nor earths 
have equalled Indra the thunderer in might. 
By Indra the lights of the sky have been fixed 
and established. Those which are established 
he has not removed.' 

1 He has settled the ancient mountains by his 
might; he has directed downwards the action 
of the waters. He has supported the earth, the 
universal nurse. By his skill he has propped 
up the sky from falling.' 

' Dawn on us with prosperity, O Ushas, 
daughter of the sky. ... O luminous and 
bountiful goddess. Ushas advances . . . arous- 
ing footed creatures, and makes the birds fly 
aloft. The flying birds no longer rest after thy 
dawning, O bringer of food. In thee, when 
thou dawnest, O lively goddess, is the life and 



32 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [chap. 

breath of all creatures. Ushas, like a dancer, 
puts on her gay attire, . . . like a fair girl 
adorned by her mother, . . . like one rising 
out of the water in which she has been bath- 
ing. Ushas dawning restores consciousness; 
fair in her aspect she has awakened all creat- 
ures to cheerfulness.' 

1 Mother of the gods, manifestation of Aditi, 
forerunner of the sacrifice, mighty Ushas, shine 
forth ! Arise, bestowing approbation on our 
prayer. . . . May Mitra, Varu/za, Aditi, the 
Ocean, the Earth, and the Sky, bestow upon 
us those brilliant and excellent resources which 
the Dawns bring to the man who offers sacrifice 
and praise.' 

1 Thou createst light, O Surya, and illuminat- 
est the whole firmament. . . . Thou, O Surya, 
penetratest the sky, the broad firmament, meas- 
uring out the days with thy rays, spying out all 
creatures. Seven ruddy mares bear thee on- 
ward in thy chariot, O clear-sighted Surya, the 
god with flaming locks.' 

'Come hither, Maruts (storm-gods) on your 
chariots charged with lightning. . . . Harness 
the red mares to the chariots, harness the ruddy 
horses to the chariots. ... I call hither this 



II] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 33 

your host, brilliant on chariots, terrible and 
glorious. . . . Through fear of you, ye terrible 
ones, the forests even bend down, the earth 
shakes, and also the mountain (cloud). May 
your water-carriers come here to-day, all the 
Maruts who stir up the rain. . . . When you 
have come forth, O Maruts, the waters gush, 
the forests go asunder.' 1 

'Now for the greatness of the chariot of 
Vata ! Its roar goes crashing and thundering. 
It moves touching the sky, and creating red 
sheens, or it goes scattering the dust of the 
earth. . . . 

1 When he moves on his paths along the sky, 
he rests not even a single day ; the friend of the 
waters, the first-born, the holy, where was he 
born, whence did he spring ? 

'The breath of the gods, the germ of the 
world, that god moves wherever he listeth ; his 
roars indeed are heard, not his form — let us 
offer sacrifice to that Vata ! ' 2 

When we turn to the kindred, but far more 
ethical, religion of the Avesta, the distinction 

1 Muir's Sanskrit Texts, vol. v. 

2 Sacred Books of the East, xxxii. 449. 

D 



34 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [chap. 

between creator and creature is more clearly 
drawn ; but the recognition of the former, in 
and by means of the latter, is none the less 
apparent : — 

'I desire to approach Ahura and Mithra 
with my praise, the lofty, eternal, and the holy 
two ; and I desire to approach the stars, moon, 
and sun . . . with my praise . . . and I desire 
to approach all the mountains with my praise, 
glorious with sanctity as they are, and with 
abundant glory. 

' And I offer ... to Ahura and Mithra, . . . 
the holy two, and to the stars which are the 
creatures of Spe?zta Mainyu, . . . and to the 
Moon which contains the seed of cattle in its 
beams, and to the resplendent Sun of the fleet 
horses . . . and to these places, districts, past- 
ures, and abodes with their springs of water, 
and to the waters and the lands, and the plants, 
and to this earth and yon heaven, and to the 
holy wind, and to the stars, and the moon, even 
to the stars without beginning (to their course), 
the self-appointed, and to all the holy creatures 
of Spe^ta Mainyu. 

1 We worship thee, the Fire, O Ahura Mazda's 
son . . . and we worship the good and best 



II] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 35 

waters Mazda-made, holy, all the waters Mazda- 
made and holy, and all the plants which Mazda 
made, and which are holy. 

'Thus do we worship Ahura Mazda, who 
made the Kine . . . and the waters, and the 
wholesome plants, the stars, and the earth, and 
all . . . objects that are good. Yea, we wor- 
ship Him for His Sovereign Power and His 
greatness, beneficent . . . and we worship this 
earth that bears us, together with Thy wives, 
O Ahura Mazda ! . . . O ye waters ! now we 
worship you, you that are showered down, and 
you that stand in pools and vats, ... ye female 
Ahuras of Ahura, you that serve us in helpful 
ways, well forded and full-flowing, and effective 
for the bathings. 

'And we sacrifice to the fountains of the 
waters, and to the fordings of the rivers, to the 
forkings of the highways, and to the meetings of 
the roads. 

'And we sacrifice to the hills that run with 
torrents, and the lakes that brim with waters, 
and to the corn that fills the corn-fields ; and we 
sacrifice to both the protector and the Creator, 
to both Zarathuitra and the Lord. 

' And we sacrifice to both earth and heaven, 



36 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [chap. 

and to the stormy wind that Mazda made, and 
to the peak of high Haraiti, and to the land, 
and all things good.' 1 

Passing from Persia to Palestine, we enter a 
still purer religious atmosphere ; but the clear 
monotheism and high morality of the later He- 
brews only enhance the prominence of nature 
in their devotional literature : — 

' The heavens declare the glory of God, and 
the firmament sheweth His handiwork.' 

' He telleth the number of the stars, and 
calleth them all by their names.' 

'The sea is His, and He made it, and His 
hands prepared the dry land.' 

1 Who in His strength setteth fast the moun- 
tains, and is girded about with power.' 

' He gathereth the waters of the sea together 
as it were upon an heap, and layeth up the deep 
as in a treasure house.' 

' He bringeth forth the clouds from the ends 
of the world ; and sendeth forth lightnings with 
the rain, bringing the winds out of His treas- 
uries.' 

1 It is the Lord that commandeth the waters ; 

1 Sacred Books of the East, xxxi. 



II] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 37 

it is the glorious God that maketh the thunder. 
It is the Lord that ruleth the sea, the voice of 
the Lord is mighty in operation, the voice of 
the Lord is a glorious voice.' 

' He rode upon the cherubims and did fly : 
He came flying upon the wings of the wind.' 

' He made darkness His secret place ; His 
pavilion round about Him with dark waters and 
thick clouds to cover Him.' 

' He giveth snow like wool, and scattereth the 
hoar-frost like ashes ; He casteth forth His ice 
like morsels ; who is able to abide His frost ? 
He sendeth out His word and melteth them, 
He bloweth with His wind, and the waters 
flow.' 

* Praise Him, sun and moon, praise Him, all ye 
stars and light. . . . Fire and hail, snow and 
vapours, wind and storm, fulfilling His word; 
mountains and all hills; fruitful trees and all 
cedars, beasts and all cattle; worms and 
feathered fowls.' 

' Thou deckest Thyself with light as it were 
with a garment, and spreadest out the heavens 
like a curtain.' 

' Thy way is in the sea, and Thy paths in the 
great waters, and Thy footsteps are not known.' 



38 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [chap. 

1 Thou that makest the outgoings of the morn- 
ing and evening to praise Thee.' * 

Passing on from Hebrew to Greek and Roman 
literature, we return to pantheistic and polythe- 
istic modes of thought, but the influence of 
nature is evident in both. 

* Zeus is the air, and Zeus the earth and heaven, 
And all things ; and what else is over all,' 2 

says Aeschylus. 

1 Men have inferred,' says Virgil, ' from the 
instincts of the bees, that they partake of the 
divine mind, and breath of heaven : ' — 

1 for God pervades the whole 
Earth and the spacious sea, and heaven profound.' 3 

And again — 

' An inward spirit feeds earth, heaven, and sea, 
The shining moon, and giant stars ; a mind 
Pervades their limbs, and moves the mighty mass.' 4 

And Lucan, again — 

1 Whate'er thou seest, where'er thou goest is Jove.' 

Such pantheistic passages might easily be 
multiplied, while those of a more polytheistic 

1 The Psalms. 2 Clem. Alex. Strom, v. 

8 Virgil, Georg. iv. 220. 4 Id. Aeneid, vi. 724. 



II] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 39 

tone are too numerous to admit of selection. 
A single typical instance must suffice — the 
famous apostrophe of Prometheus : — 

1 holy heaven, and ye winged winds 
And springs of waters, and unnumbered smiles 
Of ocean waves ; and thee all- mother earth, 
And thee all-seeing circle of the sun, I call 
To witness what I suffer.' 1 

In an artificial age such language might be 
called merely poetical, in the sense of meaning- 
less ; but there is no question that for the Greek 
it was full of serious reality. 

But after all, as Bacon remarks, * Ethnicis 
moralis philosophia vice theologiae erat,' — the 
moral philosophers were the religious teachers 
of pagan antiquity. 

And though it is difficult, of course, to gen- 
eralize on so wide a subject as Greek philoso- 
phy, one may safely go so far as to say that in 
all its forms and stages, with the exception of 
one somewhat subordinate school, it was charac- 
terized by the recognition of reason in nature. 
The early thinkers with their pregnant sayings 
— ' All things are full of gods ' — ' All was 

1 Aesch. Prom. Vinct. 88. 



40 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [chap. 

chaos till mind arranged it ' — ' Thought and 
being are one ' ; Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, 
with their insistence on rational causation ; the 
Stoics and Neo-platonists, with their diverse 
forms of pantheism, were alike influenced by the 
picture of the material world, its order and its 
harmony, its beauty and its use, as suggestive of 
divine guidance, either from above or from within. 
Plato viewed the world, and especially its beauty, 
as the manifestation of divine ideas that were 
more real than itself ; Aristotle tended to view 
it as the realization of divine ideas, that without 
material embodiment would have been abstract 
and incomplete. The one doctrine led to the 
transcendent God of the Neo-platonists, the 
other to the immanent God of the Stoics ; but 
for both schools alike, though in different ways, 
matter was religiously significant. 

'The thoughtful contemplation of nature,' 
says Cicero, 'is food to our minds. We are 
ennobled and uplifted above human affairs, and 
learn to look down on our own littleness, by 
thinking on the grandeur of the heavens 
above.' * 

1 For what else is nature ? ' asks Seneca, ' but 

1 Cic. De Nat. Deor, ii. 41. 



II] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 41 

God and Divine reason, immanent in the world 
and all its parts.' 1 . . . 'What is God? The 
sum total of all thou seest, and of all thou canst 
not see.' 2 

Christianity, with its correlative doctrines of 
the Trinity and the Incarnation, laid equal stress 
both on the transcendence and immanence of 
God, or in less technical terms upon His su- 
premacy and His omnipresence, and was ena- 
bled therefore to appropriate and utilize both 
Neo-platonic and Stoic thought, but with a 
tenderer appreciation of nature that is distinc- 
tively its own. Origen, the first systematic 
teacher of theology, is described to us as begin- 
ning his instructions with the ' high and holy and 
most beautiful' study of 'the sacred economy 
of the universe.' And modern readers, whose 
notion of the Christian Fathers is often merely 
of ponderous folios upon dusty shelves, would 
be surprised at their loving interest in the sights 
and sounds of the natural world. 

'The wider our contemplation of creation,' 
says St. Cyril, 'the grander is our conception 
of God.' 3 

1 Sen. Nat. Qu. ii. 45. 2 Id. Pro/. 13. 

Cyril Jerus. Cat. ix. 2. 



42 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [chap. 

1 Earth,' says St. Basil, — ' Earth, air, sky, 
water, day, night, all things visible, remind us 
who is our benefactor.' 1 ' The more profoundly 
we penetrate the laws on which the universe is 
founded and sustained, the more do we behold 
the glory of the Lord.' 2 

And again — 

' If ever on a bright night, while gazing at 
the stars in all their beauty, you have thought of 
the Creator of all things ; if you have asked 
yourself who it is that has bespangled heaven 
with such flowers, and endowed all things with 
usefulness even greater than their beauty; if 
ever in the daytime you have studied the won- 
ders of the light and raised yourself by things 
visible to the invisible Being, then you are a fit 
auditor (of Christian truth).' 3 

Gregory of Nyssa, Basil's brother and fellow- 
follower of Origen, has similar thoughts: — 

' Look only,' he says, ' at an ear of corn, at 
the budding of a plant, at a bunch of ripe 
grapes, at the beauty in fruit and flower of the 

1 Basil, Hex. iii. io. 2 Id. In Ps. xxxiii. 

3 Basil, Hex. vi. I. 



II] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 43 

early autumn; at the mountains, their bases 
green with grass which no human hand has 
sown, while their summits cleave the azure of 
the sky ; at the springs that issue from their 
swelling slopes like fruitful breasts, to run in 
rivers through the glens; at the sea that re- 
ceives all waters, yet remains within its bounds ; 
its waves, stayed by the shore-side, which they 
can never pass beyond. Look at these and 
such-like sights, and can the eye of reason fail 
to read in them lessons of eternal truth ? ' 2 

For ' Matter had its origin in the uncreated 
loveliness, and throughout the whole range of 
matter there are echoes of spiritual beauty, 
through which we may be led to their imma- 
terial archetypes.' 2 

Nor is it only the Greek Fathers who say 
things like this : — 

'Who can look on nature,' asks St. Hilary, 
* and not see God ? ' 3 

' Every aspect and process of nature,' says 
Augustine, ' proclaims its Creator ; with diverse 
moods and changes like a variety of tongues.' 4 

1 Greg. Nyss. De mort. inf. 2 Dion. Areop. Cel. Hier. c. ii. 
8 Hilary, In Ps. Hi. * Aug. Lib. Arb. iii. 70. 



44 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [chap. 

And again, Gregory the Great : — 

1 If we look attentively enough at outward, 
material things, we are recalled by them to 
inward, spiritual things. For the wonders of 
the visible creation are the footprints of our 
Creator ; Himself as yet we cannot see, but we 
are on the road that leads to vision, when we 
admire Him in the things that He has made. 
And so we call created things His footprints, 
since they are made by Him and guide us to 
Himself.' 1 

Such sentences might indeed be culled from 
almost every patristic writer, and are frequently 
echoed even in the austere pages of the school- 
men, while we gain glimpses of the same feeling 
on the dainty pages of illuminated books, in the 
choice of sites for monastic houses and hermits' 
homes of prayer, in the countless legends of 
tender sympathy between the animals and holy 
men. The Celtic saints in especial are full of 
the poetry of nature, but perhaps its best ex- 
pression is in the famous hymn of St. Francis 
of Assisi : — 

1 Greg. Mag. Moral, xxvi. c. xii. 



II] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 45 

1 Praised be my Lord God with all His creat- 
ures, and specially our brother the sun, who 
brings us the day, and who brings us the light ; 
fair is he and shines with a very great splen- 
dour : O Lord, he signifies to us Thee ! 

1 Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, 
and for the stars, the which He has set clear 
and lovely in heaven. 

' Praised be my Lord for our brother the 
wind, and for air and cloud, calms and all 
weather by the which Thou upholdest life in 
all creatures. 

' Praised be my Lord for our sister water, 
who is very serviceable unto us, and humble 
and precious and clean. 

1 Praised be my Lord for our brother fire, 
through whom Thou givest us light in the dark- 
ness ; and he is bright and pleasant and very 
mighty and strong. 

1 Praised be my Lord for our mother the 
earth, the which doth sustain us and keep us, 
and bringeth forth divers fruits and flowers of 
many colours, and grass.' * 

When we pass to the Renaissance and the 
Reformation with their multitude of writers, 

1 Qu. fr. Sabatier, Life of St. Francis, p. 306. 



46 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [chap. 

selective quotation from the mass of material 
becomes almost impossible. Men returned to 
the study of nature at first hand in every de- 
partment of life, philosophers, poets, preachers, 
artists, all alike; and though of course the 
effect on some was renewed materialism, count- 
less others recognized the spirituality of matter. 
This was the case, for instance, with many of 
the Italian natural philosophers, the men who 
practically inaugurated that renewed study of 
nature of which Bacon was content to talk. 
The poetical pantheism of Giordano Bruno is 
well known ; but here is a more theistic expres- 
sion of kindred thoughts from his contemporary 
Campanella, who was much impressed by the 
discovery of magnetic attraction, and himself 
the first to recognize the sexes in plants : — 

'All things,' he says, 'feel, or the world 
would be a chaos. For fire would not aspire, 
nor stones gravitate, nor waters seek the sea, 
unless they knew that their continuance de- 
pended on leaving their opposite to find their 
like. . . . For God who is the first power, first 
wisdom, and first love, has bestowed upon all 
things the power of existence, and with it such 



ii] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 47 

wisdom and such love as shall suffice to con- 
tinue their existence, for the time that His 
ruling providence wills them to be. . . . God 
said, let all things feel, some more, some less, 
as they have more or less necessity to imitate 
My being; and let them love to live in that 
element which they know to be good for them, 
lest My creation come to naught. Sky and 
stars are endowed with keenest sensibility; and 
we may well suppose that they express their 
mutual thoughts to one another by the inter- 
change of light, and that their sensibility is full 
of pleasure.' 1 

Mere fantastic poetry this may seem to some, 
but it has modern affinities among philosophers 
as well as poets. 

Then in literature we find Petrarch, who is 
the first to show the modern sense of scenery, 
and whose letters are full of the love of it, 
speaking of the spiritual thoughts which it 
inspires : — 

' This little spot under the rocks, in the midst 
of the waters, is more suited than any other to 
inspire profound thoughts by which the most 

1 Qu. fr. Hallam, Lit. Eur. ii. 374. 



48 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [chap. 

idle minds may feel themselves lifted to lofty con- 
templation. . . . How often has night found 
me still wandering in the fields ! How often 
have I risen in the silence of a summer night 
to offer up my prayers and midnight orisons to 
Christ, and then to steal forth alone ... to 
wander by the light of the moon over the fields 
and mountains ! ' 1 

While the same note is continually struck by 
the great painters, who in those delicate back- 
grounds, which were the first beginnings of all 
our modern landscape art, delight to associate 
the aspects of nature, its smiling pastures, and 
its storm-rent rocks, with all the varying phases 
of spiritual life. 

Protestant theology stands in sharp contrast 
with the other movements of the Renaissance. 
It is the more instructive therefore to notice 
that in this point they are at one. Here is a 
passage from the German mystic, Suso : — 

' Oh, how cloudlessly and cheerfully the 
beautiful sun rises in the summer season, and 
how diligently it gives growth and blessings to 
the soil; how the leaves and the grass come 

1 Trans, in Century Rev. liv. 4. 



ii] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 49 

forth ; how the beautiful flowers smile ; how 
the forest, and the heath, and the meadows 
resound with the sweet songs of the nightingale 
and other small birds ; how all the animals 
which were shut up during the hard winter 
come forth and enjoy themselves and go in 
pairs ; how, in humanity, young and old mani- 
fest their joy in merry and gladsome utterances ! 
O tender God ! if Thou art so loving in Thy 
creatures, hozv fair and lovely must Thou be in 
Thyself ! Look further, I pray you, and be- 
hold the four elements, — earth, water, air, and 
fire, — and all the wonderful things in them ; 
the • variety and diversity of men, beasts, birds, 
fishes, and the wonders of the deep, all of 
which cry aloud and proclaim the praise and 
honour of the boundless and infinite nature of 
God ! O Lord, who preserves all this ? Who 
feeds it ? Thou takest care of all, each in its 
own way, great and small, rich and poor. 
Thou, God ! Thou doest it ! Thou, God, art 
indeed God ! ' 1 

Luther, again, was notorious for his religious 
love of nature. But it is not so well known that 
Zwingli felt the same : — 

1 Qu. fr. Hagenbach, Hist, of Doct. E. T. ii. 230. 

E 



50 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [chap. 

1 From God,' he says, ' as from a fountain, 
and, if I may use the expression, a first material, 
all things arise into being. By God's power all 
things exist, live, and operate; even in Him 
who is everywhere present ; and after His 
pattern who is the essence, the existence, the 
life of the universe. Nor is man alone of 
divine origin, but all creatures, though some 
are nobler and more august than others. Yet 
all alike are from God and in God, and in pro- 
portion to their nobility they express more of 
the divine power and glory. . . . We recognize 
in things inanimate, not less than in man, the 
presence of the divine power by which they 
exist, and live, and move. God is in the stars ; 
and inasmuch as the stars are from Him and in 
Him, they have no essence or power or move- 
ment of their own ; it is all God's, and they are 
merely the instruments through which the pres- 
ent power of God acts. For for this cause He 
called creatures into being, that man, from the 
contemplation of their mutual uses, might learn 
to recognize God's active presence everywhere, 
and especially in himself, when he saw it in all 
things else around.' 1 

1 Zwingli, De provide ntia. 



ii] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 51 

Catholic theology, again, is fundamentally op- 
posed on many points to Protestant. Yet here 
they too are agreed. The following passage 
from Fenelon is thoroughly typical of the great 
Catholic writers of the seventeenth century. 
But it might almost be mistaken for a continua- 
tion of the above. 

1 1 see God in everything ; or rather, I see 
everything in God. . . . All that exists, exists 
only by the communication of God's infinite 
being. All that has intelligence, has it only by 
derivation from His sovereign reason, and all 
that acts, acts only from the impulse of His su- 
preme activity. It is He who does all in all ; it 
is He who, at each instant of our life, is the 
beating of our heart, the movement of our limbs, 
the light of our eyes, the intelligence of our 
spirit, the soul of our soul. All that is in us, 
life, action, thought, will, is the product of His 
eternal power, and life, and thought, and will.' x 

To these we will add one English voice from 
the eighteenth century, unlikeliest of times! 
William Law, who in his later writings was so 

1 Fenelon, Exist, de Dieu, ii. c. iv; Necess. de con. Dieu, 
n. 18. 



52 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [chap. 

much influenced by Jacob Boehme, — himself 
an important link in the tradition we are trac- 
ing, — has many passages to the following 
effect : — 

' Look at all nature ; through all its height 
and depth, in all its variety of working powers, 
it is what it is for this only end, that the hidden 
riches, the invisible powers, blessings, glory, 
and love of the unsearchable God, may be- 
come visible, sensible, and manifest in it and 
by it. 

1 Look at all the variety of creatures ; they 
are what they are for this only end, that in 
their infinite variety, degrees, and capacities 
they may be as so many speaking figures, living 
forms of the manifold riches and powers of 
nature, as so many sounds and voices, preachers 
and trumpets, giving glory and praise and 
thanksgiving to that Deity of love, which gives 
life to all nature and creature. 

1 For every creature of unfallen nature, call it 
by what name you will, has its form, and power, 
and state, and place in nature, for no other end 
but to open and enjoy, to manifest and rejoice 
in some share of the love, and happiness, and 



II] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 53 

goodness of the Deity, as springing forth in the 
boundless height and depth of nature.' 1 

To turn, once more, from theology to litera- 
ture : Rousseau and Goethe typically exemplify 
the kind of men whose religious conceptions, 
though of the vaguest, are profoundly influ- 
enced by nature ; but the best, as being the ex- 
treme instances of this class that can possibly 
be quoted for our purpose, are Byron and Shel- 
ley ; men who but for nature might have been 
wholly irreligious, and who therefore exhibit 
nature's influence in its simplest form, as being 
exercised on minds which not only brought no 
religious element to its interpretation, but by 
their rejection of all positive religion were 
biassed in an opposite direction. Yet they are 
full of the mystic emotion which natural sights 
and sounds inspire. 

Take the opening passage, for instance, of 
Shelley's Alastor: — 

' Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood ! 
If our great mother has imbued my soul 
With aught of natural piety to feel 
Your love, and recompense the boon with mine ; 

1 Law, Spirit of Love, ii. 



54 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [chap. 

If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even, 

With sunset and its gorgeous ministers, 

And solemn midnight's tingling silentness ; 

If autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood, 

And winter robing with pure snow and crowns 

Of starry ice the grey grass and bare boughs ; 

If spring's voluptuous pantings, when she breathes 

Her first sweet kisses, have been dear to me ; 

If no bright bird, insect or gentle beast 

I consciously have injured, but still loved 

And cherished these my kindred ; — then forgive 

This boast, beloved brethren, and withdraw 

No portion of your wonted favour now ! 

Mother of this unfathomable world ! 
Favour my solemn song, for I have loved 
Thee ever and thee only.' 1 

Or again, Byron's lines in Childe Harold: — 

' To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell, 
To slowly trace the forest's shady scene, 
Where things that own not man's dominion dwell, 
And mortal foot hath ne'er, or rarely been ; 
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen, 
With the wild flock that never needs a fold ; 
Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean ; 
This is not solitude ; 'tis but to hold 
Converse with nature's charms, and view her stores 
unroll'd.' 2 

1 Shelley, Alastor. 2 Byron, Childe Harold, ii. 25, 



II] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 55 

' Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt 
In solitude, where we are least alone ; 
A truth, which through our being then doth melt, 
And purifies from self : it is a tone, 
The soul and source of music, which makes known 
Eternal harmony.' l 

' I love not man the less, but nature more, 
From these our interviews, in which I steal 
From all I may be, or have been before, 
To mingle with the universe, and feel 
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.' 2 

But our quotations must, by this time, have 
grown tedious, so with one passage from Words- 
worth we will conclude — the well-known pas- 
sage in the lines on Tintem, which may be 
called the locus classicus upon the subject : — 

' I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still 

1 Shelley, Alastor, iii. 90. 2 Byron, Child* Harold, iv. 178. 



56 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [chap. 

A lover of the meadows and the woods, 
And mountains ; and of all that we behold 
From this green earth ; of all the mighty world 
Of eye and ear, — both what they half create, 
And what perceive ; well pleased to recognize 
In nature and the language of the sense, 
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 
• The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
Of all my moral being.' 1 

Now it will be noticed that the above quo- 
tations range through the whole of recorded 
history ; they might have been indefinitely mul- 
tiplied ; and every one of them expresses, not 
the experience of an individual, but of endless 
generations of men ; psalmists, poets, and even 
philosophers becoming popular only as they 
utter the innermost feelings of humanity at 
large. Here then we have evidence that nat- 
ure — the material world with its sights and 
sounds — has exerted, throughout all ages, a 
profound religious influence on the thoughts 
and affections of men. There are famous ex- 
ceptions, of course, like Lucretius ; but they 
are critical and reflective rather than sponta- 
neous ; and by the fact that they are recog- 

1 Wordsworth, Lines on Tintern Abbey. 



II] THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE 57 

nized as exceptions — paradoxical opponents of 
habitual opinion — they conduce, if anything, 
to prove the rule. It should further be borne 
in mind that the influence in question is inde- 
pendent of any particular theological inter- 
pretation, co-existing alike with monotheism, 
polytheism, pantheism — a mystic emotion, more 
fundamental than the varieties of creed — a 
primary, permanent, worldwide agent, in the 
education of the human soul. Thus matter 
has, as a fact, from the very dawn of human 
history ministered to the religious development 
of spirit ; and when we remember what religion 
is, and all that it has done for man, it is not 
too much to say that among all the ministries 
of matter, this, its service to religion, is beyond 
comparison the chief. 



CHAPTER III 

DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 

WE have seen, in the foregoing survey, 
that the religious influence of external 
nature is a fact of experience; nothing rare 
or exceptional, but an ordinary fact of normal 
human experience. And as the significance 
of this fact depends upon its magnitude, — its 
agelong existence and worldwide extent, — it 
is very important to bear in mind the distinc- 
tion between the experience itself and its in- 
terpretations. For its interpretations being 
inevitably coloured by the spirit of their age, 
have varied with every variety of culture and 
of creed. And as men easily tend to confuse 
the original impression with the philosophic 
or theological belief into which they instinc- 
tively translate it, they often appear to be 
going further than their premisses allow, and 
so bring the whole process into disrepute. 
One man, for example, claims to see in nat- 
58 



[chap, in] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 59 

ure a benevolent creator; another a dualism; 
another a plurality of spiritual beings ; another 
a universally diffused spirit. But all these are 
interpretations of an immediate experience in 
the light of a general belief, and are liable 
to obscure, by their contradictory character, 
the universality of the experience in question. 
Still, beneath them all that experience re- 
mains; a sense, in the presence of nature, 
of contact with something spiritual; a sense 
of affinity, or kinship, as the Neo-platonists 
described it, with the material world, imply- 
ing spirituality within or behind it. The feel- 
ing is hard to describe in more definite terms, 
since even the emotions that it arouses are 
very different in different minds; but though 
undefinable it is intense, and, as we have seen, 
unquestionably normal to humanity. 

Now unless this experience can be dis- 
credited, it must be recognized as weighty 
evidence of a spiritual reality behind material 
things. And it can only be discredited either 
by proof that it is an illusion, or by proof 
that the faculties which feel it are unworthy 
of trust. 

To say that it is an illusion is of course 



60 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [chai* 

equivalent to saying that it arises from an 
instinctive inference, which the growth of 
knowledge has enabled us to correct. The 
world as scientifically understood in the pres- 
ent day, is very different from the world as 
sensibly perceived ; and the former is in con- 
sequence often supposed to be more real than 
the latter, — atoms, energy, and ether, — that 
is to say, more real than the lights and 
shadows which their movements cast. Hence 
the emotions, it is argued, which sensible phe- 
nomena arouse have no adequate counterpart 
in fact; and as being founded on unreal ap- 
pearances must needs be themselves unreal. 

This objection at once raises the question, 
' What do we mean by reality ? ' and this is more 
easily asked than answered. In a sense — and 
perhaps this would be the most ordinary answer 
— whatever exists is real : a real thing is a 
thing that actually exists. But as soon as we 
have said this we see that the problem has only 
been transferred from 'reality' to 'existence.' 
For dreams exist; hallucinations exist; love 
exists ; the external world exists ; but with very 
different kinds or degrees of existence. Exist- 
ence therefore must be more defined, if it is to 



in] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 6 1 

be our criterion of reality. And this has led to 
the popular opinion, supported by much popu- 
lar philosophy, that reality is constituted by 
existence in space : in accordance with which, 
what were called the primary qualities of bodies, 
that is their spacial characteristics, such as size 
and shape, came to be regarded as more real 
than their secondary qualities, such as tempera- 
ture, colour, or scent. But this distinction does 
not help us, for it is utterly untenable, and 
together with the view of reality which it im- 
plied is fast becoming obsolete. On the one 
hand, all sensations, inasmuch as they are affec- 
tions of our bodily organism, exist equally in 
space, the redness of an apple, as well as its 
roundness : while, on the other hand, all sensa- 
tions alike require mental acts of inference and 
interpretation, to convert them into perceptions 
or sources of knowledge. Hence it is impossible 
to make ' reality ' turn upon any distinction be- 
tween inward and outward, or as it is commonly 
called, subjective and objective existence; for 
the simple reason that these two phases, or 
aspects, of being perpetually interpenetrate 
and pass into each other, and though separable 
by mental abstraction, are inseparable in fact. 



62 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [chap. 

But if for spacial we substitute personal ex- 
istence we are at once on a more hopeful road. 
For, whatever our use of language, there can 
be no doubt that, in actual life, every man re- 
gards his own personality as the most real thing 
that he knows ; not only because its existence 
is most certain, but because its content is most 
rich and full. ' I profess,' as Browning says, — 

* To know just one fact — my self-consciousness — 
'Twixt ignorance and ignorance enisled.' l 

By a natural and instinctive process we extend 
this conviction to other persons, and regard 
them as more real than impersonal things. 
Hence, however little we may have reflected 
upon it, personality is, as a matter of fact, our 
tacitly acknowledged standard of reality ; and 
other things are accounted real, in proportion 
as they are related to, and so embraced within, 
the sphere of personality. Thus my friends 
and neighbours, my property, the books that I 
have read, the science that I have acquired, the 
deeds that I have done, the things that gratify 
my senses, or offer resistance to my muscles, 
'my star that dartles the red and the blue,' are 

1 Browning, Francis Furini. 



in] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 63 

more real to me than all the world beside, with 
which as yet I have only negative relations. In 
a word, what affects me personally, and thereby 
becomes part of myself, is real for me ; while 
what affects me most persistently and most 
powerfully is most real. I recognize the same 
to be the case with other persons; that each 
has his own world of reality : and further that, 
while some things only affect individuals, and 
may therefore be called subjectively or rela- 
tively real, other things affect all alike, and are 
therefore real, for all, that is to say universally 
or objectively real. And when I correct my 
subjective impressions, by reference to objective 
reality, it is this that I mean by the term, not 
what is external, but what appeals equally to 
all. For 'what appears to all,' as Aristotle 
says, ' that we say exists ' (6 wdcn 80/cel tovt 
elvai <t>afiev). Now the condition of this 'ap- 
pearing to all ' is presentation in external space, 
since even a thought, if it is to appear to all, 
must be written in a book. Consequently space 
is a medium, but not therefore a constituent of 
reality. Thus we consider a word more real 
than a thought, and a deed than a word; and 
this is because they successively involve more 



64 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [chap. 

of our entire personality. In uttering and en- 
acting our thoughts, we have the courage of 
our opinions; we put our will into them and 
show that we mean them ; and therefore that 
they are real for us. While at the same time, 
through the medium of utterance, or bodily ex- 
pression, we bring them into contact with other 
persons, and thus enlarge the sphere of their 
reality. So when a man writes a book, carves 
a statue, paints a picture, he is said to realize 
his thoughts or make them real; not merely 
because he externalizes them in space ; but be- 
cause he puts his will into them ; changing the 
creations of his mere imagination into creations 
of his very self ; while, in so doing, he also pub- 
lishes them, or makes them public ; that is he 
recreates them in the minds and affections of 
countless other persons. 

Objection is sometimes made to our admit- 
ting degrees of reality; but there is abundant 
philosophical authority for so doing; and if 
reality is to imply existence, it must, as we 
have seen, vary in degree. It follows that 
personality, the highest form of existence 
which we know, must be our standard of re- 
ality; and if so, what is most intimately and 



in] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 65 

permanently connected with personality must 
be for us, that is for the world of persons, 
correspondingly real. Things are real, not in 
proportion as they are independent of us, or 
removed from us, but in proportion, on the 
contrary, as they are related to us: their re- 
moval in space only making them more real, 
because it invests them with a permanent pos- 
sibility of relationship to a larger number of 
persons. Hence, to return to our starting- 
point, atoms and their properties, as revealed 
by science, are not more real than the sen- 
sible impressions which they create in all 
normally constituted persons : while those im- 
pressions which profoundly touch the feelings, 
and modify the conduct of innumerable men, 
may even be called more real, in the only 
intelligible sense of the word, than their me- 
chanical causes, known only to a small minority 
of the race. 

Take the sunset for example — a series of 
ethereal vibrations, merely mechanical in origin, 
and, as such, other than they seem ; whose 
total effect is to create in us an optical illusion, 
making the sun, and not the earth, appear to 
move. Yet, as men watch its appearance, 



66 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [chap. 

thoughts and feelings arise in their hearts, 
that move their inmost being in unnumbered 
ways. Youth is fired with high ideals ; age 
consoled with peaceful hopes; saints, as they 
pray, see heaven opened; sinners feel con- 
science strangely stirred. Mourners are com- 
forted ; weary ones rested; artists inspired; 
lovers united ; worldlings purified and softened 
as they gaze. In a short half-hour all is over : 
the mechanical process has come to an end; 
the gold has melted into grey. But countless 
souls, meanwhile, have been soothed, and sol- 
aced, and uplifted by that evening benediction 
from the far-off sky ; and the course of human 
life to-day is modified and moulded by the setting 
of yesterday's sun. In the same way, a piece 
of music, a sonata or a symphony, is more real 
to its audience than the acoustic laws which 
cause it, or the instruments upon which it is 
performed. The world of science, in other 
words, is no more real than the world of sense, 
the two being only different aspects of one 
continuous whole, of which the human organ- 
ism is also a part. It follows that we have no 
ground whatever for discounting the religious 
influence of external nature, as less real than 



in] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 67 

the mechanical phenomena, on which, physi- 
cally speaking, it depends, and of which, in 
fact, it may be called a manifestation. The 
two things impress different faculties in us, 
but with equal justification. 

This leads us to the second objection above- 
mentioned, which is really the same objection, 
urged from another point of view : the untrust- 
worthiness, namely, of our emotions. It is too 
often assumed that the emotions, as contrasted 
with the intellect, are untrustworthy guides to 
truth ; and many, even of those who think other- 
wise, still allow the emotions to be called irra- 
tional ; as though belief in them were an act of 
faith, in some sort needing an apology. Thus, 
in the present case, the prospect of nature con- 
fessedly fills us with emotion ; but such emotion, 
it is argued, has no right to be its own inter- 
preter ; no right to assure us of its contact with 
a spiritual object; no right, in a word, to give 
us any knowledge, beyond that of its own exist- 
ence. Now this sharp distinction between feel- 
ing and understanding, the emotions and the 
intellect, is wholly artificial, and untrue to fact. 
Knowledge starts neither with mere under- 
standing, nor mere feeling, both of which are 



68 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [chap. 

abstractions, but with personal experience, the 
experience of a person who both thinks and 
feels, and in whose unity thought and feeling 
are inseparably fused and blent. 'When the 
soul feels, it is called sense . . . when it under- 
stands it is called mind,' as Alcuin admirably 
put it long ago. Experience begins with sensa- 
tion, that is to say, feeling ; but sensation, as we 
have seen, no sooner begins to be felt, than it 
begins to be interpreted by thought; while 
thought itself, the critic and interpreter, is the 
thought of a being full of feelings, which in 
one degree or another qualify every process of 
his mind. It is true that we can isolate parts 
of our personal experience, by exclusive atten- 
tion, and make them objects of independent 
pursuit; but this always involves a process of 
limitation, or abstraction, which in proportion to 
its completeness removes us from the totality of 
truth. Thus a tea-taster, or a piano-tuner, con- 
fines his attention to particular sensations ; a 
pure mathematician to abstract thought ; while 
an artist will employ different faculties from 
a soldier, and a soldier from a judge. And it 
is very easy to be so biassed by our special 
occupations, that we become incomplete, one- 



in] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 69 

sided, fragmentary men, like Wordsworth's phi- 
losopher — 

' One that would peep and botanize 
Upon his mother's grave. 

One to whose smooth rubbed soul can cling 
Nor form nor feeling, great nor small ; 
•A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, 
An intellectual all in all.' 1 

But the way in which common sense always 
resents such specialism is sufficient proof of 
our instinctive feeling that, after all, we are 
persons and not machines ; and as persons we 
confront not a part only of our environment, 
but the whole. The plain man as well as the 
philosopher has and must have his theory of 
life, however little he may put it into words ; 
his view that is to say of his relations to the 
whole of his surroundings, nature, society, and 
for all who believe in Him, God. But the 
whole of our surroundings, our total environ- 
ment, impresses and appeals to our total per- 
sonality ; that is to say, to our personality not 
regarded as a group of separate faculties, but 
as a unity or whole. Consequently it can only 

1 Wordsworth, A Poefs Epitaph. 



70 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [chap. 

be apprehended aright by our total personality, 
our whole self with its complex interaction of 
emotion, intellect, and will ; in which persistent 
feeling is as important an element as consistent 
thought. 

Reason is of course always at work to under- 
stand the world, and by that very fact implies 
its belief that the world is, in the last resort, 
intelligible, or capable of being ultimately un- 
derstood; and its consequent right to reject 
what is demonstrably irrational or contradictory 
of reason. But things may be unintelligible, in 
the sense that we do not now understand them, 
without being in any way irrational or intrinsi- 
cally absurd. The world indeed is full of such 
unintelligible things — things of whose nature 
we know nothing, but of whose reality we are 
sure ; and a rational man accepts them as facts, 
however unable he may be to explain them. 
We are familiar enough with this principle in 
ordinary life, where we daily accept and utilize 
facts, which, though scientifically explicable, we 
ourselves do not personally understand. A plain 
man does not understand his sensations of 
hunger and thirst or heat and cold, but when 
he accepts them as facts, and feeds and clothes 



in] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 71 

himself accordingly, he is as rational as the 
physiologist who has a complete understand- 
ing of all the processes of animal life. And 
the same is the case with things which are 
at present beyond all human comprehension. 
Time, space, motion, life, love, and indeed the 
whole of our experience, in its last analysis, is in- 
explicable. We are obliged to accept it as a fact, 
before we can reason about it at all; and no 
amount of subsequent reasoning can ever ex- 
plain how it came to be a fact. Hence reason, 
in all concrete cases, has to deal with materials 
which it never fully understands ; and its action 
is limited accordingly. It is like a discoverer 
who can assert that what he has found exists, 
but cannot add that what he has not found does 
not exist. In discussing any part of our per- 
sonal experience, therefore, the first question 
that arises is, not whether it is rational, but 
whether it is a fact. If it is a fact, if it exists, 
if it is really there, reason cannot set it aside, 
for any present inability to understand it. And 
this is precisely the condition of the particular 
experience before us. It is a fact as old as 
history ; normal and natural to man ; and to 
discredit it, as merely emotional, because we 



72 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [chap. 

cannot explain it, is absurd. It is not merely 
emotional ; it is personal : it is the effect, that 
is to say, of the natural world, not upon our 
feelings, abstracted from the rest of us, but 
upon our feelings in their vital connexion with 
the rest of our personality. And in this con- 
nexion we have as much justification for trust- 
ing our feelings as for trusting our reason ; 
since in either case it is the one personality 
behind them which we really trust. If I trust 
my reason, I am trusting one function of my 
complex personality ; that is to say, I am trust- 
ing my personality in one of its activities. And 
when, by so doing, I reach results which can be 
verified, as for instance in the discovery of a 
new planet, I prove my trust to be justifiable. 
I prove that my personality to that extent acts 
truly. But this very fact inevitably leads me to 
conclude that the other functions of the same 
personality, its other modes of activity, must be 
equally veracious ; and that feelings which are 
natural and normal may be trusted in evidence 
of what they feel ; for in either case it is one 
self-same personality that acts. I might be 
sceptical, if I could suppose that my whole 
personality misled me ; but science, by proving 



Ill] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 73 

that part of my personality tells the truth, 
banishes this supposition, and makes scepticism 
impossible. Henceforth I must trust my per- 
sonality, and if in one of its functions, then in 
all, for they stand or fall together. 

Returning, then, to the point from which we 
started, the religious influence of external 
nature ; this cannot, we see, be discredited on 
the ground that the sights and sounds on which 
it rests are illusory — mere phenomena — mere 
appearances ; for the very fact of the effect 
which they produce in us is their sufficient title 
to reality. It is precisely because they appear, 
and by appearing profoundly affect us, that 
they are real. Neither can the influence in 
question be disparaged for being emotional 
rather than rational ; since there is no possible 
ground for elevating one element of our person- 
ality above another, or above the action, which 
is what here occurs, of our personality as a 
whole. 

But if all this be true, and the experience in 
question cannot be invalidated, then it remains, 
a stupendous evidence that the material universe 
is a manifestation of spirit. This question is too 
often treated as if it were merely an argumenta- 



74 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [chap. 

tive inference — an inference from beauty, or 
the need of causation, or the traces of design, 
or the like ; in oblivion of the fact that behind, 
and prior to, all these inferences, there is the 
spiritual influence, which nature does, as we 
have seen, undoubtedly exert. And our reason 
for emphasizing the distinction between this 
influence and its interpretations, is to bring its 
universality into stronger relief. However vari- 
ously men interpret it, they all feel and have 
ever felt it alike. 

Now we often hear it said that the first aspect 
of nature — its prima facie aspect — makes for 
materialism. But in the light of the foregoing 
facts, this is unquestionably not the case. The 
prima facie aspect of the world conduces to 
spiritual belief, and the view which makes for 
materialism is not the prima facie view, but that 
which we obtain by going behind the prima 
facie view, to examine its machinery. But in so 
doing we pass from the whole to a partial view. 
The prima facie view is the judgement of our 
personality as a whole, in contact with nature as 
a whole ; that is, a judgement in which our 
entire being takes part. But the analytical or 
scientific view is a partial view, with important 



Ill] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 75 

elements left out ; it makes abstraction, for its 
own purpose, of certain properties of things, 
and omits the remainder. And though the 
physical sciences have been called concrete, in 
comparison with the still more abstract mathe- 
matics, yet they are all abstract to this extent, 
that they regard only the physical relations of 
phenomena, which possess also moral and emo- 
tional relations. Such abstraction is of course 
as necessary for the development of thought, as 
is its practical equivalent, the division of labour, 
for the development of life. As social progress 
only begins when the different members of a 
society confine themselves to the performance 
of different functions, so intellectual progress 
only begins when the various aspects of the 
world are distributed for analysis, each to a 
separate science. But neither the specialization 
of science, nor the division of labour, are ends 
in themselves. If we wish to understand human 
nature, in its fullness, we do not confine our 
attention to particular classes of the community 
— soldiers, statesmen, merchants, thinkers, art- 
ists, artisans ; but pass on to the total society, 
which includes, and is enriched by, all these 
partial lives ; and supplements, and correlates, 



76 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [chap. 

and unifies them all. In the same way, if we 
wish to understand material nature, in its full- 
ness, we must pass on from its partial analysis 
to its total effect ; from the examination of its 
mechanical structure, its chemical properties, its 
organic development, its aesthetic appearance, 
to the actual result of all these things in synthe- 
sis, that is, in their living combination as pre- 
sented to the personality of man. We then find 
that nature, in its concrete unity, has a spiritual 
character which cannot be discovered from its 
abstract parts; any more than the subject of a 
puzzle picture can be known before we have put 
its isolated portions together; or the meaning of 
a word before we have arranged its letters when 
given us to spell. In order to emphasize the 
fact that this spirituality of nature is not an 
inference but an experience, we have purposely, 
as above stated, set the variety of its interpreta- 
tions aside ; though that very variety is of 
course additional proof of the reality of the 
experience in question ; since it shows that, how- 
ever differing in all their theories of the world, 
men have always agreed that here was a fact, a 
persistent something, to be explained. But now 
that we are clear upon this point, we may return 



in] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 77 

to the further question of its interpretation. 
What is the relation of the material universe to 
that Spirit of which it so persistently seems to 
speak? The experience with which we are 
dealing has, as we have seen, been historically 
compatible with theories of every description ; 
but those theories are not all equally tenable on 
other grounds. 

Polytheism and dualism, for instance, are no 
longer possible interpretations ; for the universe 
is obviously one. Its unity of structure and 
development, though often maintained in other 
ages, has been placed by modern science in an 
entirely new light; and that unity leaves no 
place for the thought of contradictory beings at 
its helm. If the system of things be guided by 
spiritual power, that power must be ultimately 
one. And if we are to form any further con- 
jecture of the way in which this Spirit is related 
to the material order, we must recur to the 
starting-point of all our knowledge, namely, 
ourselves. Human personality, however little 
we may comprehend it, is yet the thing that we 
know best, as being the only thing that we 
know at first hand, and from within. And 
further, human personality exhibits spirit and 



78 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [chap. 

matter in combination ; such intimate combina- 
tion that, as we have seen above, they do not 
admit of being completely sundered. It is in 
human personality alone, therefore, that we 
must look for light upon our subject; the 
limited light indeed of a lantern carried in our 
own uncertain hand, but still the only light that 
we can possibly possess. 

Now we find on reflection that what we call 
our spirit transcends, or is, in a sense, inde- 
pendent of the bodily organism on which other- 
wise it so entirely depends. Metaphysically 
speaking this is seen in our self-consciousness, 
or power of separating our self as subject from 
our self as object, a thing wholly inconceivable 
as the result of any material process, and relat- 
ing us at once to an order of being which we 
are obliged to call immaterial. But as meta- 
physical analysis is 'caviare to the general,' 
while the metaphysically-minded will find this 
point amply illustrated by most modern philoso- 
phers, it will be sufficient for our purpose to 
appeal to the more familiar field of morals. 

Morally speaking, we are responsible for our 
actions. That is a fact which no sane man 
doubts. It is the assumption on which the 



in] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 79 

whole course of our political and social life is 
carried on ; and if a man takes leave to deny it, 
except in theory, law soon interferes for his cor- 
rection. There is no fact in the world that, in 
their misery, men would more gladly have 
denied ; yet they are agreed to treat its denial 
as a manifest absurdity. Surely, then, it is as 
strong a conviction as any that can be con- 
ceived. And this conviction is amply sufficient 
for our purpose ; for it implies that we are 
self-identical and free, the same personal unit 
to-day that we were when born — whereas all 
the matter of our bodies has changed — and 
capable of determining ourselves from within, 
whereas all matter is determined by something 
else, and from without. 1 Our present object is 
not to argue these points, which have been 
argued abundantly elsewhere, but simply to 
refer to them, as results of past argument, in 
illustration of the fact that, with all our depend- 
ence upon matter, we yet transcend it; we 
move in a plane above it, and are, though in a 
limited degree, its masters and not its slaves. 
This, then, is one aspect of the relation between 
spirit and matter, as known within the circle of 

1 See Appendix. 



80 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [chap. 

our own personality. And when we pass be- 
yond that circle to mould the external world to 
our use, through various forms of scientific 
invention, and artistic creation, it becomes still 
more apparent that spirit has a dominant and 
transcendent relation to matter. 

But from another point of view our spirit 
may be described as ' immanent ' in matter. It 
not only works through the brain and nervous 
system, but, as a result, pervades the entire 
organism, animating and inspiring it with its 
own ' peculiar difference ' ; so that we recognize 
a man's character in the expression of his eye, 
the tone of his voice, the touch of his hand ; 
his unconscious and instinctive postures, and 
gestures, and gait. Nor is this ' immanence ' 
confined to the bodily organism. It extends, 
in what may be called a secondary degree, to 
the inanimate objects of the external world. 
For a man imprints his spiritual character upon 
all the things with which he deals, his house, 
his clothes, his furniture, the various products 
of his hand or head. And when we speak of 
a man's spirit surviving in his works, the ex- 
pression is no mere metaphor ; for through 
those works, even though dead and gone, he 



in] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 81 

continues to influence his fellow-men. And when 
we look at the pictures of Raffaelle, or listen 
to the music of Beethoven, or read the poetry 
of Dante, or the philosophy of Plato, the spirit 
of the great Masters is affecting us as really 
as if we saw them face to face : it is immanent 
in the painted canvas and the printed page. 

Spirit then, as we know it in our own per- 
sonal experience, has two different relations to 
matter, that of transcendence, and that of im- 
manence. But though logically distinct, these 
two relations are not actually separate : they 
are two aspects of one fact ; two points of view 
from which the single action of our one per- 
sonality may be regarded. As self-conscious, 
self-identical, self-determined, we possess qual- 
ities which transcend or rise above the laws 
of matter; but we can only realize these qual- 
ities, and so become aware of them, by acting 
in the material world ; while conversely mate- 
rial objects — our bodies, and our works of art 
— could never possibly be regarded as expres- 
sions of spirit, if spirit were not at the same 
time recognized as distinct from its medium of 
manifestation. 

If then we are to raise the question, 'What 



82 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [chap. 

is the relation of the supreme Spirit to the 
material universe ? ' this is the analogy upon 
which we must proceed; for we have no other. 
We may indeed decline the problem as wholly 
insoluble ; but if we attempt its solution at all, 
it must of necessity be upon the lines of the 
only experience which we possess — this expe- 
rience in which transcendence and immanence 
are combined. 

This at once excludes pantheism, the belief 
that God is merely immanent in matter; for 
attractive as this creed has often seemed to 
worshippers of nature, it cannot really be con- 
strued into thought. Spirit which is merely 
immanent in matter, without also transcending 
it, cannot be spirit at all; it is only another 
aspect of matter, having neither self-identity 
nor freedom. Pantheism is thus really indis- 
tinguishable from materialism; it is merely 
materialism grown sentimental, but no more 
tenable for its change of name. 

The logical opposite of pantheism is deism, 
in the sense of belief in a merely transcendent 
God ; and this is equally inconsistent with our 
analogy; for as we have no experience what- 
ever of spirit or matter as existing apart, we 



in] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 83 

cannot conceive either term of the deistic uni- 
verse. But deism of this kind, though it has 
occupied an important place in history, is 
scarcely a form of thought with which at the 
present day we need to reckon. It belongs to 
a metaphysical rather than a scientific atmos- 
phere and age. 

Yet another view of the question has been 
suggested under the name of monism ; the view 
that ' matter in motion is substantially identical 
with mind/ that they are two aspects of one 
thing, which from the outside we call matter, 
and from the inside mind. At first sight this 
seems only another name for materialism; and, 
in fact, the word monism is expressly used by 
Haeckel as synonymous with scientific mate- 
rialism. But its use has also been advocated 
in a theistic sense ; the mental aspect being 
regarded as prior in importance, though not 
in existence, to the material, — a position very 
much akin to Spinozism. Now the supposed 
advantage of this theory is, that it abolishes all 
the difficulties of dualism. But it is obviously 
no more than an imaginative conjecture, and 
upon what does it rest? 'We have only to 
suppose that the antithesis between mind and 



84 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [chap. 

motion — subject and object — is itself phe- 
nomenal or apparent, not absolute or real.' l 
That is to say that, when we are confronted 
in our personal experience with a dualism, 
whose mystery we cannot solve, we may at 
once attain intellectual satisfaction, by the sim- 
ple expedient of assuming it to be an illusion. 
But this is precisely what the materialist does, 
and is condemned for doing ; and we are no 
more justified in discrediting the primary facts 
of consciousness in the interests of spirit, than 
in the interests of matter. Monism, in short, 
whether material or spiritual, is not based upon 
what we know in ourselves, and what is, to that 
extent, solid fact ; but upon distrust of what we 
think we know in ourselves — a sceptical foun- 
dation, which cannot possibly support a positive 
conclusion. It should further be noticed that, 
in the above quotation, mind and matter are 
treated as synonymous with subject and object. 
This in itself is a mistake, but a mistake essen- 
tial to the theory. For it is only by considering 
mind as a mere series of subjective or mental 
states, that we can plausibly consider motion as 
its parallel concomitant. But the characteristic 

1 Romanes, Mind, Matter, and Monism. 



Ill] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 85 

of mind, as we know it in our personal spirit, is 
that it is both subject and object at once; it is 
capable of becoming its own object, and saying 
I am I. It is through this power of self- 
consciousness, or self-diremption, that spirit 
transcends matter, as we have already had 
occasion to point out; and it is precisely this 
power which we are unable to conceive as hav- 
ing any material equivalent. Monism, in fact, 
started from the physical side, from analysis of 
the cerebral conditions of thought; it rests on 
physical analogies, and is coloured by physical 
modes of thought ; and the attempt to make it 
metaphysically tenable seems an impossible 
tour de force. 

It remains then that we confine ourselves 
to the analogy of our personal experience, and 
conceive of God as at once transcending and 
immanent in nature; for however incompre- 
hensible this relationship may be, we know it 
in our own case to be a fact, and may legiti- 
mately infer its analogue outside ourselves. 

On this analogy, then, the divine presence 
which we recognize in nature will be the pres- 
ence of a Spirit, which infinitely transcends 
the material order, yet sustains and indwells 



86 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [chap. 

it the while. We cannot, indeed, explain the 
method, either of the transcendence, or of the 
indwelling; but we come no nearer to an 
explanation, by attempting, with any of the 
above-mentioned theories, to obtain simplicity 
by suppressing either aspect of the only anal- 
ogy that we possess. But it will be remem- 
bered that in our own case we noticed two 
degrees of immanence : our essential imma- 
nence in our body, which is consequently often 
called our person ; and our contingent imma- 
nence in the works which we are free to create 
or not at will. The question therefore inevi- 
tably arises, under which of these analogies 
are we to think of God's relation to the world. 
Is the universe His body, or His work? Dif- 
ferent answers have been given to this ques- 
tion by different thinkers ; and it is obvious 
that no answer can be more than conjectural 
or hypothetical. 

Under these circumstances, we are entitled 
to urge that the Trinitarian conception of God, 
which we Christians have independent reasons 
for believing to be true, is intellectually the 
most satisfactory ; since it embraces both the 
kinds of immanence in question, and therefore 



in] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 87 

harmonizes with the entire analogy of our per- 
sonal experience. For according to this doc- 
trine, the Second Person of the Trinity is the 
essential, adequate, eternal manifestation of the 
First, 'the express image of His person,' 'in 
whom dwelleth the fullness of the Godhead 
bodily,' while ■ by Him all things were made.' 
Here then we have our two degrees of im- 
manence ; the complete immanence of the 
Father in the Son, of which our own relation 
to our body is an inadequate type ; and, as a 
result of this, His immanence in creation, anal- 
ogous to our presence in our works ; with the 
obvious difference, of course, that we finite 
beings, who die and pass away, can only be 
impersonally present in our works; whereas 
He must be conceived as ever present to sus- 
tain and animate the universe, which thus be- 
comes a living manifestation of Himself ; — 
no mere machine, or book, or picture, but a 
perpetually sounding voice. 



CHAPTER IV 

DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 

THE thought of God's immanence in nature 
has commended itself at the present day, 
on quite independent grounds, to many of the 
students both of science and philosophy. But 
if God is immanent in nature, He must also be 
immanent in man, since man is a part of nature ; 
and if it is not so, our previous belief will be 
discredited, while if it is so, it will be strongly 
confirmed. 

Now when we turn to man, we are struck at 
once by the phenomenon of conscience: the most 
mysterious of all his attributes. What we com- 
monly call conscience is a complex thing; various 
strands are woven into its woof. It has a long 
history behind it, and was not, in early ages, 
either as intelligent or as definite as now; nor, 
of course, is it equally educated among all races 
at the present day. But what we find in its 
highest development must have been implicitly 



[chap, iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 89 

present in its earliest germ ; and what we do 
find is a sense, within our inmost self, of some- 
thing 'not our self which makes for righteous- 
ness ' ; a categorical imperative, an authoritative 
voice, which we can only ascribe to God. This 
is the religious account of conscience, and it 
cannot be explained away. No hypothesis that 
has ever been suggested will really account for 
its unique authority ; and moreover we have not 
to deal with past possibilities, but present facts. 
We know perfectly well what we mean by a 
categorical imperative, an absolute, unqualified, 
unconditional command ; and we know perfectly 
well that it is thus, and only thus, that con- 
science speaks. And it is this that leads us to 
regard conscience 

' As God's most intimate Presence in the soul 
And His most perfect Image in the world.' 1 

Moreover in proportion as conscience is con- 
sistently obeyed, goodness and holiness of char- 
acter result; and this is a process which the 
good and holy, the men who by experience 
know most about it, habitually ascribe to the 
co-operation of God, — ' God working within 

1 Wordsworth, Excursion, iv. 



90 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [chap. 

them,' in scriptural phrase, 'both to will and to 
do of His good pleasure.' ' Amor Dei intellect- 
ualis] says even Spinoza, ' pars est infiniti amoris, 
quo Deus seipsum amat, ' Our love of God in 
its highest form is but a portion of God's infinite 
love for Himself.' It is easy to say that such 
men misinterpret their own history, and attribute 
to divine assistance what is but a function of 
themselves. But those who have confessedly 
succeeded in attaining what other men have 
failed to attain, must, in common sense, be 
credited with knowing best what has been the 
secret of their own success. Nor as a matter 
of fact is the experience in question at all con- 
fined to the saintly few, the elect minority in 
every age, who have been eminent for character 
and conduct. It is echoed and has been echoed, 
from the dawn of history, in countless human 
hearts ; far and wide men have believed that, in 
the spiritual struggles of their inner life, they 
were aware of divine intervention and assistance ; 
while in proportion as the struggle has been 
more successful, the conviction has grown more 
sure. The fact that such a phenomenon cannot 
be expressed in scientific terms, and is entirely 
out of the range of our psychology, must not 



IV] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 9 1 

be allowed to blind us to its enormous magnitude 
— the immense place which it fills, and has filled, 
in the spiritual life of our race. 

Thus God's immanence in nature, we may 
reasonably assert, reappears as inspiration in 
man. Meanwhile our spiritual character reacts 
upon the material instrument of its realization, 
moulding the brain and nervous system, and 
thence the entire bodily organism, into gradual 
accordance with itself, till the expression of the 
eye, the lines of the face, the tones of the voice, 
the touch of the hand, the movements, and 
manners, and gracious demeanour, all reveal, 
with increasing clearness, the nature of the 
spirit that has made them what they are. Thus 
the interior beauty of holiness comes by degrees 
to be a visible thing; and through His action 
upon our spirit, God is made manifest in our 
flesh. While in proportion as we are enabled 
to recognize this progressive manifestation of 
God in matter, we are prepared to find it cul- 
minate in His actual Incarnation, the climax of 
His immanence in the world. 

It must not of course be forgotten that one 
of the popular objections to Christianity is 
founded upon this very fact, that it is so con- 



92 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [chap. 

gruous with human thought. Man, we know, 
in uncritical ages, tends to believe in incarna- 
tions ; they are a common form of thought with 
him ; he is predisposed in their favour ; medi- 
cine men, priests, kings, prophets, and abnormal 
individuals of every kind, being constantly re- 
garded as embodied gods. And the Christian 
Incarnation, it is argued, is but the last linger- 
ing survival of these obsolete modes of thought. 
Its resemblance to countless other baseless be- 
liefs of the kind creates a presumption that it is 
not true. This argument is usually answered 
by a reference to history ; to the external evi- 
dence and internal character of the Christian 
story, as contrasted with all other accounts of 
incarnations. But as many minds are pre- 
vented, by the very argument in question, from 
approaching the facts of history without ante- 
cedent bias, it may be well to notice that there 
is a logical as well as an historical answer. 

The tendency to believe in incarnations in- 
volves two elements — a belief in their proba- 
bility, and a belief in their actual occurrence; 
a belief that they may happen any day, and a 
belief that they have happened here and now ; 
the one being a general principle of thought, 



iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 93 

and the other a particular judgement of fact. 
And it is obvious that no number of mistakes 
on this latter point would affect the credibility 
of a new instance. The mere fact that a pos- 
sible event did not happen, in ninety-nine sup- 
posed cases, is no reason for arguing that it 
will not happen in the hundredth, — as the 
familiar story of the boy and the wolf may 
suffice to show. 

It is therefore with the other element that 
the argument is concerned, the general ten- 
dency to believe incarnations probable. But 
a general tendency in the human mind to ex- 
pect a thing cannot possibly be twisted into 
a presumption against its occurrence. ' Men 
were always expecting it, therefore it cannot 
have occurred,' is, when baldly stated, a mani- 
fest absurdity. Of course it will be answered 
that what is meant is ' Men were always ex- 
pecting it, therefore they invented its occur- 
rence.' But the fact of the expectation does 
not logically make invention a likelier alterna- 
tive than occurrence; except upon one hypothe- 
sis, namely, that the occurrence is impossible. 
And here we have the root of the whole 
matter. An incarnation is first ruled out of 



94 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [chap. 

court, as being a priori impossible ; and then 
the expectation of it is treated as an illusion. 
But this is what logicians call begging the 
question. That is to say, the tendency to 
believe in incarnations creates no presumption 
whatever against the reality of a particular 
incarnation, except upon the previous assump- 
tion that the tendency is false. Thus the 
argument before us does not really rest upon 
the fact in human nature which it quotes, 
but upon a purely arbitrary interpretation of 
the fact. We may say baldly and boldly, 
'incarnations are impossible'; but we cannot 
strengthen the statement by adding ' because 
mankind has always believed them.' An as- 
sumption may look more plausible when dis- 
guised as an induction, but it does not therefore 
gain logical force. 

Nor is this negative conclusion all that we are 
justified in drawing. For when fairly faced, 
the tendency in question is not only no argu- 
ment against the Incarnation, but rather creates 
a presumption of its truth. For it is only 
part and parcel of man's general sense of the 
divine nearness — nearness to and interest in 
himself. Man's habitual, and almost instinc- 



iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 95 

tive, belief in the existence of a God or gods 
has always been regarded as among the strong- 
est evidences of natural religion. Its univer- 
sality, that is to say, has been recognized as 
weighty evidence of its truth. But almost 
everywhere we find this belief to be inseparably 
connected with the further conviction, that 
their gods desire intercourse and friendship 
with men. And if the universality of the one 
belief is recognized as an argument in its 
favour, the practical universality of the other 
must be so too ; it must be regarded as point- 
ing to a truth. Again, we recognize that the 
religious instinct, in its earlier stages, contin- 
ually misinterpreted itself — finding gods in 
stocks and stones, sun, moon, and stars, birds, 
beasts, and fishes. But we do not consider the 
instinct itself as discredited by the fact, or our 
present conception of God as less true, because 
it was only slowly disentangled from these 
absurdities. It was not the religious instinct, 
we consider, that erred, but the crude philos- 
ophy which could not interpret the instinct. 
And it would seem to have been the same with 
the special tendency that we are considering. 
Men took it for granted that their gods were 



96 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [chap. 

desirous of intercourse with them ; and this 
instinctive expectation made it easy to believe, 
that among other modes of manifestation, the 
gods had not only spoken through inspired 
men, but had themselves from time to time 
assumed human form, either in the way of 
theophany or incarnation. But here again no 
number of mistaken facts can invalidate the 
instinct behind them. Folklore and mythology 
find endless traces of supposed incarnations 
which are quite as unspiritual, and even im- 
moral, as they are unscientific, and conflict 
not only with all canons of rational criticism, 
but even with the ordinary dictates of plain 
common sense. Yet these fictions only empha- 
size the persistence of the instinct which con- 
tinued to invent them, because it continued to 
demand them. And when at length we are 
confronted with a tale of Incarnation, whose 
spiritual sublimity and actual influence are alike 
absolutely unique, its believers may fairly rec- 
ognize in the previous expectation of mankind 
an additional proof of its truth. The event has 
occurred, they may reasonably say, which man's 
prophetic soul divined. The Incarnation, that 
he often so fantastically dreamed of, has at last 
become a fact. 



iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 97 

But it may still be said, and often is said, that 
the Incarnation, in which Christians believe, is 
really as incompatible with reverent notions of 
God as the un worthier legends to which we have 
alluded ; since it involves a miraculous interfer- 
ence with the order of nature, which is utterly 
unbecoming of the author of nature ; and ought 
in fact to shock our scientific sense, as the 
earlier stories shock our moral sense of what 
is appropriate to the character of God. 

This is a very familiar objection, and has still 
great weight with many minds, but it involves 
various assumptions which, to say the least, are 
open to dispute. 

In the first place, it involves a false antithesis, 
as will easily appear from what has gone before, 
between nature and man. ' Is the great order 
of nature likely to be altered, it magniloquently 
asks, in deference to the insignificant interests 
of man ? ' But man and nature are inseparable 
parts of one whole, as we have already seen ; 
and foremost among man's attributes is his 
belief in his own spiritual importance, the ab- 
solute worth of his personality, as against all 
impersonal things. This instinct may be justi- 
fied by philosophical analysis, as we have 



98 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [chap. 

already had occasion to point out; but it is 
far more vividly vindicated in ordinary eyes, 
by the martyr who dies for a creed. For mar- 
tyrdom is the complete refusal to compromise 
our spiritual consistency, by denying what we 
believe ; the extreme assertion that spiritual in- 
tegrity outweighs all material things ; that at all 
costs we must remain ourselves, and not contra- 
dict ourselves ; that our personality has abso- 
lute worth. There can be no question whatever 
that this conviction is inherent in the very make 
and constitution of man : and as such it is an 
element in the universe ; a phenomenon or part 
of the universe ; and as real as any of its other 
phenomena or parts. What we find therefore 
is not an order of nature on the one side, and 
human interest on the other ; but a single sys- 
tem of which this conviction is a part ; an order 
of nature in which it is included ; a combination 
of two elements of which one possesses the at- 
tribute of claiming supremacy over the other. 
We cannot study external nature except through 
our spirit, and our spirit brings this inevitable 
conviction with it to the task. In the very act 
of knowing matter we judge it subordinate to 
spirit, while matter itself subserves the judge- 



iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 99 

ment through the brain by which it is made. 
To say therefore that the order of nature is not 
likely to be altered for man, or in other words, 
that matter is not likely to be altered in the in- 
terest of spirit, is to contradict our fundamental 
conception of the relative importance of the 
two. And no such argument, from moral im- 
probability, can be raised against miracle as 
such. 

Moreover, when the miraculous character of 
the Incarnation is attacked, it is important to 
distinguish between the fact of the Incarnation, 
and its mode, the conditions and circumstances 
by which it was accompanied. For upon reflec- 
tion we may easily see, that there is no justifi- 
cation whatever for regarding the fact of the 
Incarnation, the fact of God becoming man, as 
a miracle in any ordinary sense of the word. 
For by a miracle we mean an interference with 
the usual order of events, — something which 
happens differently from other cases of its kind, 
— as when a dead man comes to life again, or 
water is made wine. But an event which by its 
nature is, ex hypothesis unique — the sole and 
only possible occurrence of its kind — has no 
usual order with which to come in conflict ; and 



IOO DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [chap. 

unless it be intrinsically irrational, there can be 
no antecedent presumption against it. It may- 
be strange, surprising, stupendous, but, in no 
intelligible sense of the word, miraculous. Thus 
nothing in the course of nature, nothing in the 
previous history of man, could create a shred of 
rational presumption against the occurrence of 
an Incarnation. It stands free to be judged 
without bias on its own intrinsic claim. 

It may of course be replied that this dis- 
tinction between the fact and the mode of the 
Incarnation is unfair; since the two things are 
inseparable elements of one supposed event, 
which must be discredited as a whole, by the 
incredible character of either part. But the 
whole point of the distinction in question is to 
preclude such an objection, by showing that the 
fact stands in a necessary relation of logical 
priority to the mode, and must be considered 
first : that the Incarnation is the inevitable pre- 
supposition of its miracles. If Jesus Christ was 
the divine Author of our human life and death, 
it is manifestly absurd to say that He could not, 
or would not, heal the sick and raise the dead. 
Such miracles, taken by themselves, would be 
in the last degree improbable ; but as results of 



iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN ioi 

an Incarnation they are so probable that we 
should even call them natural. Thus the in- 
credibility of the mode entirely vanishes, if the 
fact be true ; and we can never ask about a 
Christian miracle simply, ' Is it likely to have 
happened ? ' but ' Is it likely to have happened, 
if Christ was God ? ' Consequently, when we 
hear the Gospels rejected on account of their 
miracles, it is obvious that the divinity of Christ 
has been rejected first. But if so, upon what 
ground ? Evidently and necessarily upon an 
a priori ground — the a priori ground that an 
Incarnation is improbable. Hence it is impor- 
tant to show, as we have done above, that such 
a presumption has no logical foundation. It is 
merely a baseless prejudice for which no sound 
reason can be produced. For what are the 
facts of the case ? The picturesque simile of 
the bird flying in from the night, we know not 
whence, and out in the night again, we know 
not whither, is as true of human life to-day, as 
when it was first urged, in the hall of Eadwine, 
as an argument for listening to the Christian 
teacher. With all our science, we know noth- 
ing, unless from revelation, of the ultimate 
origin or final destiny of man ; why he exists, 



102 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [chap. 

and how the purpose of his existence can best 
be carried out. Even of what man really is, we 
have probably at present no more knowledge, 
than an Qgg would convey of an eagle, or an 
acorn of an oak. And if this is true of our 
knowledge of man, it is true a fortiori of our 
knowledge of God. Apart then altogether from 
any question of revelation, can there be a 
shadow of reason for presuming that God, of 
whose essential nature we are absolutely igno- 
rant, cannot become man, of whose essential 
nature we know hardly more ? It may be as 
natural, so to speak, for God to become man, as 
for God to create man ; and the Incarnation 
may, for all we know, be an inevitable conse- 
quence of creation, as some theologians have 
ventured to assert. Any prejudice therefore 
that we may feel against the probability of the 
Incarnation, is not a reasonable conviction but 
an irrational bias, due to the shock of its great 
mystery upon the mind. We are so unaccus- 
tomed to think of mysteries, in the trivial round 
of daily life, that their unexpected presentation 
is an affront to us. Yet all ultimate realities 
are equally mysterious, when once we pause to 
think of them, — being, life, sense, thought, love, 



iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 103 

will, God ; — omnia exeunt in mysterium, as the 
schoolmen said ; there can be no possible pre- 
sumption against the occurrence of an event 
merely because its mystery is profound. 

Still, the absence of contrary presumption, 
it may be urged, does not carry us far ; and 
there must be very strong evidence in favour 
of the Incarnation, before it can be received. 
There is of course very strong evidence, in 
the judgement of its believers ; but its strength 
is still often obscured, by the mistaken idea 
that it consists chiefly of miracles. For mira- 
cles, at the present day, far from supporting 
anything else, are popularly supposed to be 
themselves much in need of support; so that, 
for many minds, they tend to invalidate, rather 
than to fortify, the credit of any document 
wherein their occurrence is recorded. And 
though this position requires criticism, it may 
for the present be passed over; since miracles 
neither are, nor ever were, regarded by the 
Christian Church as the primary proof of 
the Incarnation. For the Incarnation is pri- 
marily and essentially a spiritual fact, and no 
conceivable amount of evidence that was merely 
material could prove it; spiritual things must 



104 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [chap. 

be spiritually discerned. And so the person- 
ality of Jesus Christ is its own self-evidence. 
* Which of you convinceth Me of sin ? ' He 
asks, and ' If I speak the truth, why do ye 
not believe Me ? ' A sinless man must speak 
the truth, and therefore be what He asserts 
Himself. He appeals to His character to 
substantiate His claim : bids men look at Him 
and recognize that He must be what He says. 
Now such an appeal is directly addressed to 
the spiritual insight of His hearers, and can 
only succeed where that insight exists. It was 
rejected as a matter of course by those who 
did not know goodness when they saw it; 
the self-satisfied or sensual men who assumed 
bad motives for good actions ; the morally and 
spiritually blind. But it was accepted by His 
faithful followers, His intimate friends of every 
day ; the men and women whom His glance 
had kindled, and His voice had quickened to 
new life ; and in whose souls, as they looked 
and listened, insight arose out of much love. 
And it was this inner circle of 'witnesses' 
that were gradually trained by Jesus Christ, 
first to believe in Him, and then to under- 
stand Him, and finally to proclaim Him to the 
world. 



iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 105 

This then was the primary proof, the essen- 
tial evidence of the Incarnation ; the self-reve- 
lation of a person to persons. But it was 
unquestionably accompanied, as Christians be- 
lieve, by works of superhuman power, and 
sealed by the crowning miracle of resurrection 
from the dead. The attempt to deny these 
miracles, or to reject the Gospels on account 
of them, lands us amid worse problems than 
those which it seeks to solve. For we cannot 
eliminate from history either the person or the 
work of Christ; and the more we discredit the 
recorded account of them, the more hopelessly 
perplexing does their supremacy become. 

But if the Incarnation was a fact, and Jesus 
Christ was what He claimed to be, His miracles, 
so far from being improbable, will appear the 
most natural things in the world. For no one 
will deny, that in this case, He could have 
worked them ; and when we look at them, it 
seems likely that He would; for they harmonize 
completely with His whole character and work, 
— being mainly acts of charity and mercy, 
either to the bodies or the souls of men ; and 
at the same time profoundly symbolical of 
spiritual truth. They are indeed so essentially 



106 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [chap. 

a part of the character depicted in the Gospels, 
that without them that character would entirely 
disappear. They flow naturally from a Person 
who, despite His obvious humanity, impresses 
us throughout as being at home in two worlds. 
Moreover the possessor of these miraculous 
powers is described as tempted to misuse them. 
No one, who reads the account of the tempta- 
tion, can suppose for a moment that it was 
related with any reference to the credibility of 
miracles. But for that very reason its indirect 
bearing on their credibility is great; for nothing 
can suggest more forcibly that the miraculous 
power was real, than the statement incidentally 
made, that it was the subject of temptation, 
with the further implication that in many cases 
it was consciously present but unused. The 
issue also of this temptation tallies, in a very 
remarkable degree, with the nature of the 
miracles recorded in the Gospels. One or two 
indeed of those miracles may seem, as Dr. 
Newman says, ' more or less improbable, being 
unequal in dignity to the rest ' ; and it has been 
suggested in consequence that they may be 
apocryphal. But Dr. Newman's own view is 
critically quite as reasonable, that 'they are 



iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 107 

supported by the system in which they are 
found, as being a few out of a multitude, and 
therefore but exceptions (and as we suppose 
but apparent exceptions) to the general rule.' 
And with these questionable exceptions, there 
is a dignity, a beauty, a reserve of power, a 
restriction of use, a depth of spiritual signifi- 
cance, in the miracles attributed to Christ, 
which makes us feel that they are not merely 
congruous with His whole personality, but part 
of it. We cannot separate the wonderful life, 
or the wonderful teaching, from the wonderful 
works. They involve and interpenetrate, and 
presuppose each other, and form in their indis- 
soluble combination one harmonious picture. 
But that picture, to repeat once more the old 
but unanswerable dilemma, cannot by any in- 
genuity be construed into the mere likeness 
of a man; while it is the most adequate por- 
trait that imagination can conceive of an In- 
carnate God. It is not indeed the kind of 
Incarnation that if left to ourselves we should 
have invented; but for that very reason it is 
the kind that must be true. 

This, then, was the original evidence on 
which the Incarnation was received. It was 



108 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [chap. 

the gradual self-revelation of a Person to spir- 
itually-minded persons. But among the attri- 
butes of this Person was included the power 
of working miracles ; and there cannot be a 
shadow of doubt that this was an integral 
element in the total impression which He pro- 
duced. His miracles did not prove His char- 
acter, but they essentially confirmed the claim 
which His character meanwhile predisposed 
men to accept. 

Now it is obvious that these miracles cannot 
appeal with such force to us as they once did 
to contemporary eyes. But the very same 
lapse of time, which has diminished their 
effect, has increased that of another kind of 
evidence. For every successive century that 
weakens the weight of bygone miracle, inten- 
sifies the wonder of bygone prophecy. And 
the Gospels are full of prophecy. Jesus Christ 
speaks with an absolute authoritative certainty 
of the everlasting nature of the kingdom which 
He came to found. 'The gates of hell shall 
not prevail against it ' ; ' Heaven and earth 
shall pass away, but My words shall not pass 
away ' ; and ' Lo, I am with you always, even 
unto the end of the world.' These and simi- 



iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 109 

lar utterances are only indicative of His entire 
attitude towards the remote future. He speaks 
of it with unconditional certitude throughout. 
He is come to inaugurate a change within the 
souls of men which shall continue to operate 
till the end of time. When we remember to 
whom this promise was originally made — a 
few Jewish fishermen against the world, and 
those but half understanding their Master — 
the boldness of its prophecy is apparent. Yet 
its boldness is only equalled by its truth. For 
after overcoming the world for nineteen cen- 
turies, in the precise way that He foretold, 
the power of Christ is as strong as ever upon 
earth to-day. This, then, is our modern equiv- 
alent for the signs and wonders of an earlier 
age. The same unique Person confronts us 
with the same question as of old : * Which of 
you convinceth Me of sin ? ' and 'If I speak 
truth, why do ye not believe Me ? ' But the 
words have a new significance ; for included 
in their scope are nineteen centuries of proph- 
ecy fulfilled. We cannot regard the miracles 
of Christ, therefore, as merely things of long 
ago; for they are integral parts of a living 
system which confronts the world to-day, and 



no DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [chap. 

vindicates its wondrous origin by the actual 
fact of its present wonder. 

Moreover, it must be remembered that, in 
our Christian view, the Incarnation was re- 
demptive. It was an atonement. Sin, or moral 
evil, is a part of our total human experience, 
which philosophy is bound to take into account ; 
and sin, though primarily due to the will, has 
infected the bodily organism of the whole hu- 
man race; moral and physical depravity min- 
gling with, and reacting on each other, till the 
entire resultant may be spoken of as ' the body 
of this death ' — a complex whole in which it 
is impossible to disentangle the spiritual ele- 
ment from the diseased conditions and per- 
verted functions of organ and tissue, which 
personal and ancestral sins have brought about. 

And this amounts to saying, that there is 
one department of the world in which demon- 
strably the reign of law breaks down. The 
motions of the stars are mathematically accu- 
rate; vegetable life pursues its annual round; 
animals, till man has touched them, follow the 
instincts of their kind. But with man the case 
is different. His appetites and instincts are as 
well adapted as those of other animals to en- 



iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 1 1 1 

sure the preservation of the individual and the 
race, yet he continually misuses them to the 
detriment of both. His reason endows him 
with an unique capacity for promoting the 
progress of his kind, yet his almost habitual 
use of it is self-regarding and anti-social. His 
will is conscious of a moral law, yet disobeys 
it. His whole body and soul are involved in 
one complex, composite disease, due to the vio- 
lation of the appropriate and natural laws of 
his species. This condition therefore is quite 
accurately described in the New Testament as 
lawlessness (avofiia), and involves a real breach 
of universal order — a miracle in the objection- 
able sense of the term. And it cannot be too 
often repeated that this condition of humanity 
is no philosophical hypothesis, or theological 
dogma, but a perfectly familiar fact of our 
daily experience ; — an experience which is apt, 
indeed, to be overlooked in our more ordinary 
moments, simply because it is so habitual, but 
which from time to time arrests us with an 
intensity of awfulness which language has no 
power to express. It is at once as certain as, 
and more stupendous than, any other fact that 
we know. Now a primary object of the Incar- 



112 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [chap. 

nation, as Christians believe, was to remedy 
this lawlessness, to restore this inordinate state 
of humanity to order. And historically this has 
been its effect. Real Christians in every age 
have both experienced and exhibited the grad- 
ual restitution of their entire personality to 
order. The work of Jesus Christ therefore 
comes before us, not as an hypothetical breach 
of nature's laws, but as the actual restitution 
of these laws when obviously, and beyond 
controversy, broken — the counteraction of the 
' miracle ' of sin. 

Now this consideration does not of course 
affect the physical possibility of what are com- 
monly called miracles, which is a thing that few 
sane men would deny. But it profoundly 
affects the a priori probability of their occur- 
rence, which is really the point at issue in most 
arguments upon the subject. For, instead of 
asking, ' Is God likely to interfere with His own 
laws ? ' we should ask, ' Is He not likely to 
restore them when already interfered with ? ' 
The interference is a fact ; it is daily before our 
eyes ; its appalling consequences are within us, 
and around us. Yet it is an anomaly in the 
universe, and the more we learn of the other- 



iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 113 

wise harmonious order of that universe, the 
more irresistibly we feel that such a fact cannot 
be final ; and thus the likelihood of God's inter- 
vention assumes the highest possible probabil- 
ity. But if such a counteraction of sin is to be 
brought about, it must be by the production, in 
one way or another, of a sinless humanity, 
which would be in harmony with the order of 
the universe. While in proportion as human 
beings are out of harmony with the order of 
the universe, a sinless person would not only 
appear, but be, from the human point of view, 
miraculous. We should have no standard with 
which to compare Him, and therefore no 
capacity to criticize either the condition of His 
existence, or the range of His powers. 

Now all this has an important bearing upon 
the miracles recorded in the Gospels. First 
and foremost among these miracles stands the 
virgin birth of Christ. And the real ground on 
which it is rejected is the a priori one of its 
intrinsic improbability. For the various mytho- 
logical and critical considerations which are 
adduced against it are all dependent upon and 
subsidiary to this. But in the light of what we 
have been saying, is it intrinsically improbable ? 



114 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [chap. 

The tradition of the early Church was that only 
so could the sinful entail be broken off; and 
that at a time when the relation of soul and 
body was conceived as far less intimate than we 
now know it to be. But with our modern 
knowledge of their mutual interdependence, it 
is doubly impossible to conceive that natural 
human generation should issue in anything else 
than a contaminated personality. It may be 
urged that we have no reason to think other- 
wise, even in the case of a virgin birth. But 
the cases are widely different. For of natural 
generation we have positive knowledge, based 
on universal experience, that it does as a fact 
issue in a sinful person. Whereas of virgin 
birth we have no positive knowledge ; it is 
wholly outside our experience ; we can only 
conjecture what its consequence would be. 
And in the absence of all knowledge, it is a 
perfectly conceivable conjecture, that a mode of 
birth from which an essential factor of ordinary 
heredity is absent, should involve indepen- 
dence from hereditary taint. 

When, therefore, we find a virgin birth 
asserted in Christian history and tradition, 
there can be no possible probability against it. 



iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 115 

Given ordinary human nature alone, it would 
be impossible ; but given an Incarnation, whose 
object was to introduce a sinless personality 
into the world — to which an immaculate body 
is as essential as an uncontaminated soul — its 
congruity, and therefore its probability, are 
obvious. In a word, it can only be rejected on 
a priori grounds ; and these grounds rest on 
the assumption that sinful humanity is normal ; 
but once recognize that it is abnormal, an 
anomaly in the universe, a priori objections 
vanish and historic tradition resumes its sway. 
A complete break with sinful heredity is of the 
very essence of the Incarnation; and the ac- 
count of the method of that breach which has 
come down to us rests on precisely the same 
evidence as our account of the Incarnation itself. 
Then there are the miracles of healing which 
occupy so prominent a place in the Gospels. 
These seem to many minds more credible, as 
being conceivably capable of naturalistic expla- 
nation. But it should be noticed that, however 
far such conjectural explanation may carry us, 
it does not reach the root of the matter. Christ 
emphasizes the connexion between sin and 
disease, as two aspects of one disordered per- 



Il6 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [chap. 

sonality, and connects His healing of the one 
with His forgiving of the other, as parts of the 
same redemptive work. He does not appear as 
the mere pitiful physician of exceptional abil- 
ity, but as having power on earth to forgive 
sins, and therefore to remedy their physical 
effects. He claims to have come to destroy the 
dominion of evil in the world, by striking once 
for ever at its spiritual root ; and as the sin of 
the soul has grown incorporate in the flesh, He 
heals diseases, not only in mercy, but in actual 
manifestation of the change which He is come 
to effect in the entire personality of man. In 
other words, while Christ's acts of physical 
healing are quite subordinate to His spiritual 
teaching, and are treated by Him as such, yet 
they are not merely incidental acts of mercy; 
they are an integral part of His entire work, an 
essential element in the total impression which 
He plainly designed to create, that He was 
Lord of the material as well as of the spiritual 
order, and came not merely to teach, but to 
exercise absolute authority over the bodies as 
well as the souls of men. 

The same principle underlies what may be 
called the cosmic miracles, those, that is, which 



iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 117 

more obviously imply power over the general 
processes of the material universe ; with which 
should be classed the raising of the dead. 
These evince superhuman power, but power 
which moves along rational lines, and is con- 
trolled. Christ sternly refuses to work them for 
a personal end, or to gratify a faithless curiosity 
which they would not convince. They have 
always some tender, merciful, spiritual purpose ; 
and the momentary marvel is carefully linked 
again to the customary course of nature, in a 
way to suggest that it is nowise intended to 
supersede ordinary law. Food is multiplied, 
but its fragments are immediately ordered to be 
economized. The dead are raised, but their 
friends are bidden to feed them, and release 
them from the cerements of the grave. There 
is to be no unpractical lingering in a world of 
wonder: human life must at once resume its 
course. And the total picture is not of one who 
recklessly worked wonders, such as ignorant 
ages have loved to attribute to their heroes ; 
but of one who, possessing superhuman power, 
only employed it with extreme reserve ; to man- 
ifest and symbolize the superhuman character of 
His personality and work. 



Il8 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [chap. 

Finally, there is the crowning miracle of the 
Resurrection, on which the early Church laid so 
much stress. It is easy enough to say that the 
continued existence of Jesus Christ, and not His 
corporeal Resurrection, is the important thing to 
believe. But this ignores the previous question, 
1 Who and What was Jesus Christ ? Did He, 
in the way that we have stated, connect disease 
and death with sin, and control material things 
at His will ? Was His absolute supremacy over 
death as well as sin an integral part of the claim 
which He made, and which He promised to sub- 
stantiate ? and is matter an essential element in 
human personality as we know it ? ' If so, 
whence comes the presumption that He either 
could not, or would not, reassume His immacu- 
late body, and indefinitely extend its powers ? 
Simply from the fact that all other human 
bodies decay in the grave, and are turned again 
to their earth. But all other human bodies are 
intimately contaminated by sin, whereas Christ's 
is, ex hypothesis immaculate ; and while we know 
that throughout life the soul moulds and modi- 
fies the body, we have no means whatever of 
knowing what the nature or extent of this modi- 
fication would be, when induced, not only by a 



iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 119 

sinless soul, but by a divine personality, on a sin- 
less body. We cannot conceive that anything 
short of dissolution should eradicate the taint 
from the sinful body. It must be unmade if it is 
to be remade at all. But a sinless body, moulded 
by a sinless soul, is in no such case ; and we 
have no reason whatever to suppose that it might 
not be resumed at will : while such a resumption 
would be the appropriate — the obviously appro- 
priate — climax to the whole of Christ's previous 
attitude towards matter ; the final manifestation 
of His personal triumph over the totality of sin 
— its consequence as well as its cause — and 
thus the earnest of His power to restore man's 
entire personality to ultimate order. 



CHAPTER V 

THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 

WE have urged, in the last chapter, in 
general defence of the Christian tradi- 
tion, that the miracles recorded in the Gospels 
are not merely inseparable from their context, 
but also profoundly harmonious with our con- 
ception of the Incarnation as a whole. But 
there is a class of thinkers in the present day 
who tend, in some sense, to believe the Incarna- 
tion, and yet to disbelieve in miracles ; and who 
would therefore substitute for the Christian tra- 
dition a non-miraculous Christianity, as being 
more in accordance with the spirit of the age. 
Now it must be remembered that the opposition 
to miracles is as old as Christian history, and 
has passed through many phases which the 
Christian creed has outlived and survived. And 
this naturally leads us to ask whether its pres- 
ent phase is really final, or only one more 
wave of negative opinion whose strength is 



[chap, v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 121 

already beginning to be spent. The modern 
form of objection to miracles comes chiefly, of 
course, from Spinoza and Hume, than whom it 
has never found, nor is ever likely to find, abler 
exponents. But its particular revival in the 
present day would seem, especially, to date 
from the time when ' uniformity ' became the 
dominant category of thought ; when logic was 
being based upon the ' law of uniformity ' ; 
when uniformitarianism was overpressed in ge- 
ology; and natural selection was allowed, in 
consequence, unlimited millions of ages for its 
action ; with the general result that present 
phenomena were too readily assumed to be ade- 
quate criteria of the past. And at a time like 
this, when the popular logicians laid stress on 
the uniformity of nature, and yet admitted that 
this so-called law could in no way be proved, 
but must be 'begged,' Dr. Mozley defended 
miracles by accepting this position, and show- 
ing that we could give no reason whatever for 
our belief in the order of nature ; and conse- 
quently that an interference with that order 
could not be called irrational ; it might conflict 
with our expectation, but not with our reason. 
And this was a valid argumentum ad hominem ; 



122 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [chap. 

a valid answer to any rejection of miracles, 
drawn from the uniformity of nature. But that 
phrase, of shallow meaning and questionable 
value (seeing that no two things in nature were 
ever exactly alike), has now, to a great extent, 
lost its vogue. There was an undue simplicity 
about it, which has been considerably modified 
by the subsequent progress of science. For 
our increase of scientific knowledge has also 
increased our scientific agnosticism, by widen- 
ing the horizon of what remains to be known ; 
and men are becoming far more ready to recog- 
nize that ' there are more things in heaven and 
earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.' 
And we now think less of the uniformity than 
of the unity of nature ; that unity which the 
very word ' universe ' implies ; the intimate 
correlation between the whole and its parts, 
between the parts and their whole; which 
Tennyson's 'flower in the crannied wall' is so 
often quoted to illustrate : — 

1 Little flower — but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is.' 

At first sight this conception may seem to make 
the difficulty of miracles become graver, since 



v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 123 

it increases the magnitude of the ' interference ' 
or ' alteration ' which they involve. But this is 
not in reality its ultimate effect. For uniform- 
ity may be merely mechanical; but unity is 
essentially a spiritual conception. ' The ego is 
the only unity,' says Royard Collier, 'that is 
given us immediately by nature. We do not 
meet with unity in sensible experience, but the 
mind finds it within itself, and thence transfers 
it to the outer world by analogy.' We can ea- 
sily see that this is so : for if, by an effort of 
abstraction, we separate the material element in 
experience from the spiritual, what is it that we 
find ? a succession of passing phenomena, exter- 
nal to each other, whose every fresh phase 
and moment obliterates the last ; like the waves 
upon a torrent, or the transformations of a 
dream ; a world of which the old sceptical 
dictum would be true, irdvra pel kcli ovSev fxevet^ 
1 all things are in perpetual flux, and there is no 
permanence at all.' In actual life, however, we 
do not make this abstraction ; but habitually 
and instinctively read our own spiritual unity 
into the manifold variety of things. We con- 
nect and correlate the various impressions of 
our senses, things as different as scent and 



1 24 THE INCARNA TION AND MIRA CLES [chap. 

sound and touch ; we look before and after, and 
link the present to the past, — the past which 
would otherwise have ceased to be ; we gather 
and group and compare, within the mirror of 
our mind, the scattered phenomena of distant 
space ; we weave out of what by themselves 
would be disconnected, incoherent elements, an 
unity, a system, a whole. But in so doing we 
are not creating but only recreating for our- 
selves a world which already exists without us. 
That world is not a chaotic flux, as it would be if 
merely material, but an orderly system of things. 
Atoms combine in mathematical proportion; 
stars move in their courses by mechanical rule ; 
organic life in plant and animal is minutely, 
elaborately teleological ; man is guided and de- 
veloped by a moral law. And the result is a 
coherent universe whose elements are intimately 
bound together, by the mutual ministrations of 
all to each and each to all. But all these links 
are obviously spiritual ; and analogous to what 
we find within ourselves. And thus the unity 
of nature must be due to the action of a spiritual 
power. The phrase indeed has no other mean- 
ing ; for we cannot conceive a merely material 
unity, since spirit is the only unifying agent 



v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 125 

that we know. Thus the more science im- 
presses upon us the unity of nature, the more 
does it, by implication, assert that nature is 
rooted and grounded in spirit. Now spirit, as 
we have repeatedly seen, affirms the absolute 
supremacy of its own ends. It claims as of 
right to govern, and never to subserve matter ; 
to use matter for spiritual purposes, and never 
the reverse. And whenever the reverse takes 
place, and we see spiritual beings using their 
powers in pursuit of animal, and therefore ma- 
terial, ends, we recognize at once that they are 
contradicting the very essence of their nature, 
and are therefore unrighteous or wrong. 

If then the whole of nature is rooted and 
grounded in spirit, and the primary character- 
istic of spirit is this absolute self-assertion, the 
antecedent probability of miracles is immensely 
increased. In the days of deism, when nature 
was regarded as a machine set going once for 
all, interference with its regularity may well 
have seemed impossible ; and the exaggerated 
estimate of the uniformity of nature was largely 
a legacy from those days. But if nature is only 
sustained by its intimate union with spirit, and 
spirit is what we have above described, it is no 



126 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [chap. 

wonder that the processes of nature should be 
modified for an adequate spiritual end. 

It was moreover more or less implied in the 
older objection to miracles, that we had a com- 
plete knowledge of the processes of nature; 
and could therefore see that there was no room, 
so to speak, for the miraculous element to inter- 
vene. But the more we recognize that nature 
has always a spiritual coefficient, the less con- 
fident does this assurance become. For in this 
case all causation, however mechanical upon the 
surface, must obviously run back into the spirit- 
ual region, or in other words be ultimately 
spiritual. This indeed is a conviction which 
has been gaining ground ever since Hume's 
analysis of causation. We have come to see 
with increasing clearness that physical causes 
are not causes at all, in the sense which our rea- 
son or causal instinct demands. They are only 
antecedents or conditions that transmit causa- 
tion which they cannot themselves originate. 

For our whole notion of cause is confessedly 
derived from what takes place within ourselves. 
As self-conscious beings we can be also self- 
determined ; we can frame our own ideals, 
fashion our own plans, choose which, of many 



v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 127 

suggested motives, we will make our own ; and 
all this without any compulsion from without. 
We can then realize our ideals, prosecute our 
plans, pursue our purpose in the outer world ; 
and in so doing, initiate events of which our 
own will is the veritable starting-point, since it 
includes both their ' how ' and their ' why,' is at 
once both their origin and explanation. Thus 
our will is an agent whose reason for action is 
contained within itself, and as such a self-explana- 
tory agent. When we have traced an occurrence 
to the intervention of the human will, we are at 
once content. It is fully accounted for. We 
know not merely how it began, but why (its 
raison d'etre), and have therefore reached its 
absolute beginning. This then is the source 
of our conception of cause, and this is what we 
mean by the term : — something which initiates 
changes without external compulsion, and there- 
fore out of its own inner nature, and is hence 
their real starting-point; a self-determined and 
therefore self-conscious, and therefore spiritual 
being. And this is what we postulate in the 
universe at large, when we say that it must 
have a cause. It must originate in a will which 
is its own law, and therefore its own explana- 



128 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [chap. 

tion {caussa sut), or, in mediaeval phrase, a 
being whose will and intellect are one. 

And it is only in the light of this postulate 
that we can talk of secondary or natural causes. 
They are parts of a caused whole which in their 
context partake of the causality of that whole, 
and therefore of its ultimate spirituality ; but by 
themselves they are not causes at all, but merely 
media for transmission of causation. ' We never 
exhaust the whole mass of conditions,' says a 
modern logician, 'which produce the effect. 
The event never comes, and it never could come, 
from the abstract selection which we call the 
cause. We imply the presence of unspecified 
conditions, but since these are normal we omit 
to mention them.' 1 And foremost among those 
conditions is the vital connexion of the uni- 
verse at every moment with its first cause; for 
this, as we have seen, is what its unity implies. 
He sustains it in being; and the mechanical 
laws, on which what we commonly call natural 
causation depends, are, as Lotze says, not ' laws 
which the divine action "obeys" but which it 
really at each moment creates.' 'For they 
could not have existed prior to God as a code 

1 Bradley, Logic. 



v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 129 

to which He accommodated Himself ; they can 
only be the expression to us of the mode in 
which He works.' 

' And though He thunder by law, the law is still His 
voice.' 1 

Hume's negative criticism of causation was, 
as we said, the involuntary means of turning 
thought into the above direction. For it was 
impossible to rest content with his sceptical 
conclusions, which would have made science 
and philosophy alike impossible; and in the 
process of meeting them, Kant and others came 
to recognize the fact that the causal nexus is 
ultimately spiritual. But Malebranche, long 
before Hume, had expressed both sides of the 
case with admirable clearness. * Les causes 
nature lies ,' he says, ' ne sont point de veritables 
causes, ce ne sont que des causes occasionnelles, 
qui n'agissent que par la force et refficace de la 
volonte de Dieu.' 2 

But if the action of natural causes is thus 
dependent on divine concurrence, or is in other 
words an aspect of the divine energy at work, 

1 Tennyson, Higher Pantheism. 

2 Malebranche, De la Methode, vi. ii. 3. 
K 



130 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [chap. 

our previous conclusion is further fortified. For 
so far from knowing the whole of any physical 
process, it is obvious that we know only a part 
— the appearance in fact or part that meets the 
eye : while the spiritual power which from 
moment to moment produces natural phenom- 
ena, may be reasonably conceived to change 
them, on occasion, for an adequate end. We 
shall not need therefore at the present day to 
use Mozley's argumentum ad hominem — that 
belief in the uniformity of nature is an irra- 
tional impulse — except with those who are 
still slaves to that uniformity. On the con- 
trary, we recognize that the unity of nature, and 
the causal connexion of its parts, is a rational 
conviction, but one which inevitably lands us in 
the spiritual region ; and therefore makes it easy 
to believe that the spirit which habitually con- 
trols matter, may sometimes exhibit its suprem- 
acy in extraordinary ways. Human analogy — 
and it is the highest we have — is entirely in 
favour of this. For the greater a man is, the 
more methodical and consistent he will be in all 
the usual situations of life, one whose conduct 
can be calculated, and whose character relied 
on. But, in a crisis, the same greatness will be 



v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 13 1 

shown by ability to extemporize and courage to 
innovate; while lesser men are paralyzed by 
slavish adherence to routine. The great man 
does not contradict himself, but, for a new pur- 
pose, calls new powers into play, and at the 
next moment is as regular, as orderly, as punct- 
ual as ever : the fact that he has habits does not 
alter the fact that he is free. So the habitual 
course of nature, which alone makes life and 
knowledge possible, may well be traversed by 
lightning flashes from the spiritual world, if both 
alike are being guided by one power to one end, 
and that end, in the strict sense, supernatural. 

Hence it is obvious that the probability of 
miracles cannot be settled by a rough and ready 
appeal to experience, but depends upon the kind 
of experience which we include under the term ; 
or in other words upon the presuppositions with 
which we approach experience. This is forcibly 
expressed by Dr. Newman, in a passage which 
may be worth quoting, from his Essay on 
Miracles. 

'When the various antecedent objections 
which ingenious men have urged against mira- 
cles are brought together, they will be found 
nearly all to arise from forgetfulness of the 



132 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [chap. 

existence of moral laws. In their zeal to per- 
fect the laws of matter they most unphilo- 
sophically overlook a more sublime system, 
which contains disclosures not only of the 
Being, but of the Will of God. Thus, Hume 
observes, " Though the Being to whom the 
miracle is ascribed be Almighty, it does not, 
upon that account, become a whit more proba- 
ble, since it is impossible for us to know the 
attributes or actions of such a Being, otherwise 
than from the experience which we have of 
His productions in the usual course of nature. 
This still reduces us to past observation, and 
obliges us to compare the instances of the 
violation of truth in the testimony of men with 
those of the violation of the laws of nature by 
miracles, in order to judge which of them is 
most likely and probable." The moral govern- 
ment of God, with the course of which the 
miracle entirely accords, is altogether kept out 
of sight. . . . And a recent author adopts a simi- 
larly partial and inconclusive mode of reason- 
ing, when he confuses the Christian miracles 
with fables of apparitions and witches, and 
would examine them on the strict principle 
of those legal forms which from their secular 



v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 133 

object go far to exclude all religious discussion 
of the question. Such reasoners seem to sup- 
pose, that when the agency of the Deity is 
introduced to account for miracles, it is the 
illogical introduction of an unknown cause, a 
reference to a mere name, the offspring, per- 
haps, of popular superstition ; or, if more than 
a name, to a cause that can be known only by 
means of the physical creation ; and hence 
they consider religion as founded in the mere 
weakness or eccentricity of the intellect, not in 
actual intimations of a divine government as 
contained in the moral world.' 1 

What this means is not that the moral and 
material order are in any contrast or contradic- 
tion ; they are obviously and incontestably part 
and parcel of one and the self-same system. 
But whereas we know that system, in its mate- 
rial aspect, only from without, — its surface, so 
to speak, and perhaps an inch or two below, — 
there is one point at which we penetrate within 
it, and feel that we are nearer to the heart of 
things ; and that is our personal experience of 
our own internal state — 

1 Newman, Essay on Miracles^ § 2, p. 20. 



134 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [chap. 

' I myself am what I know not — ignorance 

which proves no bar 
To the knowledge that I am, and, since I 

am, can recognize 
What to me is pain and pleasure ; this is sure, 

the rest — surmise. 

Mere surmise : my own experience — that is 
knowledge, once again ! ' 1 

And at the very root of this personal experi- 
ence, which is our only first-hand knowledge, 
we find the moral law, with its imperious claim 
to subordinate all things to itself. Thus what 
I know to be at once the most certain and the 
most fundamental fact of experience is the 
moral law with its claim to supremacy. There 
is nothing irrational, therefore, in believing that, 
on occasion, in deference to that claim, the ma- 
terial order may give way to the moral, and 

' Miracle was duly wrought 
When, save for it, no faith was possible. 
Whether a change were wrought i' the shows o' the 

world, 
Whether the change came from our minds which see 
Of the shows o' the world so much as and no more 
Than God wills for His purpose.' 2 

1 Browning, La Saisiaz. 2 Id. A Death in the Desert. 



v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 135 

This then is, in brief, our position. We fully 
grant that nature is uniform, in the sense that 
similar causes, under similar conditions, will 
always produce similar effects ; but we entirely 
deny that this principle justifies the assertion 
that what does not happen to-day cannot ever 
have happened : firstly, because we never know 
all the conditions even of what is happening 
to-day, and much less of what was happening 
centuries ago ; secondly, because among those 
conditions is the presence of the spiritual power 
on which their existence and operation depends; 
and which as spiritual, and therefore rational 
and free, can initiate a change at any point — 
a change not against nature, but against our 
ordinary experience of nature, — - non contra nat- 
uram sed contra quant est nota natura y as Au- 
gustine well expressed it long ago. 

On this presence and operation of the absolute 
spirit in all cases of causation Lotze has some 
remarks, which are precisely to our point: — 

'We are not,' he says, 'to picture the abso- 
lute placed in some remote region of extended 
space and separated from the world of its crea- 
tions, so that its influence has to retraverse a 
distance and make a journey in order to reach 



136 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [chap. 

things ; for its indivisible unity, omnipresent at 
every point, would fill this space as well as 
others. . . . Wherever in apparent space an 
organic germ has been formed, at that very 
spot and not removed from it the absolute is 
present. Nor ... is it simply this class of 
facts which compels us to assume such an ac- 
tion of the absolute. We may regard the pro- 
cess by which things that possess a life and soul 
are formed as something unusual and superior ; 
but the presence of the absolute which makes 
this process possible is no less the basis neces- 
sarily implied in the most insignificant interac- 
tion of any two atoms. Nor again do we think 
of its presence as a mere uniform breath which 
penetrates all places, and this particular spot 
among them, like that subtle, formless, and 
homogeneous ether from which many strange 
theories expect the vivification of matter into 
the most various forms ; but the absolute is in- 
divisibly present with the whole inner wealth 
of its nature in this particular spot, and in obedi- 
ence to those laws of its action which it has it- 
self laid down necessarily makes additions to 
the simple conjunctions of those elements which 
are themselves only its own continuous actions, 



v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 137 

simple additions where the conjunctions are 
simple, additions of greater magnitude and 
value where they are more complicated. Every- 
where it draws only the consequences, which 
at every point of the whole belong to the prem- 
isses it has previously realized at that point.' 1 

Now the Incarnation, in our Christian view 
of it, is a supreme instance of this action of the 
Absolute; the Being who is behind all things 
therein coming to their front, and exhibiting as 
a necessary part of the process His authorita- 
tive relation to the world. We believe it pri- 
marily for a combination of moral and spiritual 
reasons, but once believed it affects our whole 
view of the material universe. For it has a cos- 
mic as well as a human significance. It is not 
merely an event in the history of man, but an 
event, at least as far as our earth is concerned, 
in the history of matter; analogous upon a 
higher plane to the origin of life, or the origin 
of personality ; the appearance of a new order 
of being in the world. And precisely as, in 
Browning's language, 

' Man, once descried, imprints for ever 
His presence on all lifeless things/ 2 
1 Lotze, Metaphysic, § 246. 2 Browning, Paracelsus. 



138 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [chap. 
SO 

' the acknowledgement of God in Christ 
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 
All questions in the earth and out of it.' 1 

That is to say, it must for all who believe it 
become the absolutely central truth of their 
philosophy. Just as the Copernican astronomy, 
or the doctrine of evolution, have enlarged and 
modified our views of the universe, so the Incar- 
nation, once accepted, throws a new light upon 
the entire world. For on the one hand, against 
mere idealism, it emphasizes the value and im- 
portance of matter, as being the agent through 
which God's spiritual purpose is effected; and 
on the other hand, against mere materialism, it 
interprets this value and importance, as consist- 
ing in the capability to subserve that purpose. 
Thus while rejecting the respective negations of 
idealism and materialism, it sanctions their posi- 
tive elements — the supremacy of spirit and the 
reality of matter; and so supplementing each 
by the other, combines both in a concrete 
whole. 

This view of the Incarnation is sometimes, 
ignorantly, regarded as if it were only an ingen- 

1 Browning, A Death in the Desert. 



v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 139 

ious afterthought of modern apology. But that 
is merely because it sank into comparative 
abeyance, in the eighteenth century, when men 
were more occupied with negative criticism than 
with positive systems of thought. As a matter 
of fact it is as old as Christianity : it is latent, 
not to say patent, in the prologue of St. John, 
and the Epistles of St. Paul ; it has been pro- 
claimed by Christian philosophers, in every 
philosophic age ; and, with the revival of con- 
structive thinking, it has of necessity revived. 
To object that revealed truths can have no 
speculative value, and that philosophy cannot 
take account of revelation, as such, is to under- 
estimate the range of philosophy. For philoso- 
phy must deal with the totality of knowledge. 
It contemplates in Plato's phrase ' all time and 
all existence.' It cannot, without self-destruc- 
tion, ignore any kind of fact. But if there has 
been a revelation, it must have brought new 
facts — and those important ones — to our 
knowledge ; and once within the field of know- 
ledge, they are of necessity within the field of 
philosophy. Thenceforth, to philosophize with- 
out them is not merely to leave them open 
questions, but implicitly to rule them out of 



140 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [chap. 

court as being untrue ; while to philosophize 
with them is to be modified by them, in the way 
and degree that we have described — to make 
the Incarnation the centre of our speculation, 
as well as of our practical life ; the light of our 
thoughts, as well as the guide of our acts. 

But even so, it is sometimes asked, can we 
not conceive an Incarnation without miracles, 
and might not such a conception be equally the 
centre of a yet very different view of the world ? 

Undoubtedly; within limits we might frame 
such a conception. But we do not believe in 
the Incarnation because we can conceive it, but 
because we have a conviction that it happened. 
And the only evidence we have that it hap- 
pened is also evidence that it happened in a 
certain way. To borrow from that evidence the 
general notion of an Incarnation, and then pro- 
ceed to clothe it in the colours of our own imagi- 
nation, is absurd. And the only alternative is 
to accept the miraculous accompaniment of the 
Incarnation as we find it, and, so doing, to view 
the world in its light. 

There is one further question to which these 
considerations inevitably lead. 

Why do not miracles happen now ? If the 



v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 141 

power of Christ on earth is as real now as in the 
first century, why should it not be accompanied 
by similar results ? Does not the absence of 
miracle now, from the only Christian life that 
we can really test, go far to disprove its pres- 
ence in the past? Now this question, though 
it is often asked, and constitutes a real difficulty 
to many minds, tacitly assumes that in accept- 
ing the miracles of Christ, we accept the position 
that Christianity was meant to be a miraculous 
religion. Whereas the precise converse is the 
case. We regard the miracles of Christ as 
unique manifestations of His unique personality : 
things which indeed we could not have foreseen, 
but which we recognize, when once recorded, 
as eminently congruous with His life and work. 
He claimed to be superhuman, and the claim 
required substantiation to gain a hearing. At- 
tention had to be arrested ; expectation had to 
be aroused ; the advent of a new era had to be 
emphasized ; and that in an age, and among a 
people that was ready to accept miracles, and 
therefore to whom miracles were a natural — 
not to say inevitable — mode of address. Au- 
thority, absolute, unqualified, paramount author- 
ity, is the essential characteristic of the life of 



142 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [chap. 

Christ; and that authority must needs be ex- 
hibited, in order to be received. It is difficult 
even to conceive how otherwise a beginning 
could have been made. 

But the very fact that the miracles of Christ 
seem, from this point of view, so natural, makes 
it all the more instructive to notice the severe 
economy with which they are used. He never 
once employs them to relieve His personal 
necessities, but lives and suffers in strict obe- 
dience to the ordinary laws of nature. He 
refuses to work them to confute enemies, and 
warns His disciples that after all they are sub- 
ordinate things. He carefully connects them, 
as we have noticed above, with the customary 
course of life, in a way to show that they were 
not meant to supersede it : — e. g. ' Go shew 
thyself to the priest.' — 'Go wash in Siloam.' — 
'Gather up the fragments that remain.' — 'He 
commanded that something should be given her 
to eat.' — * Loose him, and let him go.' There 
is no sign in all this of any intention to intro- 
duce a reign of miracle, bringing intellectual 
confusion into the world. On the contrary, the 
fact that Christ manifestly could, yet habitually 
would not overrule it, gives additional emphasis 



v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 143 

to the reign of law — an emphasis which the 
whole tenor of His teaching serves further to 
enforce. For the burden of that teaching is 
that the course of nature is the will of God, 
and that faith should recognize that will every- 
where : in the clothing of the lilies, the feeding 
of the ravens, the fall of a sparrow, the sun- 
shine and the rain, not less than in the sick- 
nesses that punish, or the catastrophes that 
execute swift judgement upon sin. Christian 
life accordingly consists in accepting the order 
of events, not in the spirit of fatalism, but in 
the spirit of faith ; not expecting to be exempt 
from what is common to man, but patiently 
enduring to the end, 'as seeing Him that is 
invisible/ This recognition of spiritual signifi- 
cance, where the bodily eye sees none, is the 
very essence of the Christian probation, the 
characteristic distinction of the Christian life. 
It is that walking by faith and not by sight, 
that belief of those who have not seen, upon 
which the Gospels and Epistles alike lay all 
their stress. And to make this possible, mira- 
cles, in the ordinary sense, must cease. But 
they cease, it should be noticed, as the scattered 
lights of sunrise fade into the fullness of an 



144 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [chap. 

ampler day. They cease because the fact 
which they sporadically emphasized has now 
become a Christian commonplace ; the fact that 
divine providence everywhere and always uses 
matter for the furtherance of spiritual ends. 
They do not vanish out of history as though 
they had never been, and leave man to lapse 
into apathetic acceptance of the inexorable 
order of events. They have inaugurated a 
new epoch : they have interpreted the order 
of events afresh: they have accentuated and 
intensified the providential aspect of the world. 
And their perpetual trace remains in the abid- 
ing consciousness of Christians that ' all things 
work together for good to them that love God.' 
The cessation therefore of miracles was as 
needful as their occurrence : and we no longer 
look to meet with them in ordinary life. But 
they have irradiated the world for us, and left a 
glow behind them which is still 'the master 
light of all our seeing.' For they have led us 
to face nature not with passive resignation, but 
with active faith, — faith which not only reads 
in its general aspect a revelation of God, but 
often also in its particular incidents a mission 
and a message to individual men. Such faith 



v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 145 

cannot of course be tested by the methods of a 
laboratory or a law-court, and is too private 
and peculiar even to be publicly proclaimed. 
But there is no question that it is a normal 
element of spiritual experience with which 
Christians have been familiar in every age : the 
conviction that outward events have at times 
been so appositely ordered in relation to their 
personal needs, as to prove beyond power of 
doubting that the processes of nature are, at 
least on occasion, utilized in the interest of man. 
This is a belief which, it is obvious, cannot be 
produced in argument ; though at the same 
time it profoundly affects the Christian attitude 
towards argument, by endowing its possessors 
with a certitude which no critical attack can 
shake. 'At ubi sunt Mi depicti . . .' may be 
quoted against it in vain. Though therefore it 
cannot be used in argument, the fact of its 
widespread existence should have weight. For 
it is no mere sentimental fancy, or superstition 
of the ignorant and foolish. It has been shared 
by the wise and practical, the men of ideas, and 
the men of affairs. In every age and nation, 
Christians of every sort and kind have believed 
themselves in contact with a living, personal, 



146 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [chap. 

particular providence, working through material 
as well as spiritual means. They have felt 
that, in answer to prayer, or at critical moments 
in their life, outward events have aroused and 
controlled them, as distinctly as a voice or 
hand ; things which often at the time seemed 
merely natural phenomena, yet afterwards were 
recognized as ministers of God. 

1 1 can but testify 
God's care for me — no more, can I — 
It is but for myself I know ; 



No mere mote's-breadth but teems immense 
With witnessings of providence : 

Have I been sure, this Christmas-Eve, 

God's own hand did the rainbow weave, 

Whereby the truth from heaven slid 

Into my soul? I cannot bid 

The world admit He stooped to heal 

My soul, as if in a thunder-peal 

Where one heard noise, and one saw flame, 

I only knew He named my name.' 1 

This belief in a special providence is not the 
same as a belief in miracles ; but it rests on a 

1 Browning, Christ?nas-Eve. 



v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 147 

very similar view of the world. For it implies 
that the souls of men, in their separate history 
and destiny, are objects of peculiar, personal 
interest to God : while nature — material nature 
— that seems so changeless in its course, is yet 
an instrument, when rightly viewed, through 
which that interest is shown. Now though 
these thoughts had often risen in men's minds 
before, there can be no question that they 
received a novel and final emphasis from Jesus 
Christ. He first taught men to regard the 
world, as children look upon their father's 
house, with a secure sense in it, of being every- 
where at home. And it is an old remark that 
even physical science owes more than we often 
think to the friendly attitude towards nature 
which this teaching introduced. But miracles 
were among the means, as we have seen cause 
to believe, which Christ employed to give 
weight to His words : leading men to trust His 
interpretation of the world by visible proof that 
the world was His own. If then our intimate 
faith in providence comes to us from Christ, it 
is lineally connected with the wonders that He 
wrought. For it is the inner reality, the essen- 
tial truth, which those wonders were used to 



148 THE INCARNA TION AND MIR A CLES [chap, v] 

enforce, in an age and among a race where 
it could only have gained credence by their 
means. And now, in its turn, it makes them 
credible, by the ever-recurring experience of its 
own intrinsic wonder. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS 

WE have seen that the aspect of the mate- 
rial universe has a profound religious in- 
fluence on man; but matter has another kind 
of connexion with religion, which is hardly less 
important, arising from the reaction upon it of 
the human mind. A flower growing in the field, 
quick with form and scent and colour, is far 
fairer than one dried between the pages of a 
book ; yet though the former may indeed give 
us ' thoughts that do often lie too deep for 
tears,' the latter may be linked with tender 
memories of bygone love, which invest it with 
greater power over our personal life. So be- 
side the general religious impression which the 
beauty and wonder of the world creates, we 
find special associations of spiritual import gath- 
ered round particular material things ; and mat- 
ter has thus what may be called a secondary 
as well as a primary connexion with religion. 
149 



150 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

Historically speaking, indeed, the former is 
even more prominent than the latter in the 
early stages of human development. For the 
distinction in question closely corresponds to 
that between myth, and ritual or cultus, with 
which we are nowadays so familiar; and of 
these, cultus in early religion so often over- 
shadows myth, that it has even been supposed 
by some to precede it. Thus myths embody 
what may be called the primary teachings of 
nature, the simple spiritual ideas which its as- 
pect inevitably awakes in the mind of man ; 
while cultus depends upon the various second- 
ary associations, by which man has invested 
particular places and actions and things with 
spiritual significance, of a more or less arbitrary 
kind. 

Cultus then, in its widest sense, is concerned 
with an immense variety of rites and things, of 
very different degrees of dignity and worth. 
In early religion, for example, there is the 
senseless fetish ; the sacred animal regarded as 
an ancestor or god ; the solemn feast at which 
the clansmen renew their vital union by feed- 
ing together the flesh, or life-blood, or emblem 
of their god ; on the various kinds of sacrifice 



vi] AND SACRAMENTS 151 

which apparently arose out of these commun- 
ions ; the sacred spots which divers causes had 
invested with spiritual awe ; the ceremonial cus- 
toms whereby life's epochs, of birth, puberty, 
marriage, and death, were consecrated by the 
sanctions of religion. While when we come to 
more civilized ages, and cultivated races, the 
same things reappear upon a higher level of 
refinement. The rude idol gives place to the 
shapelier statue ; the sacred grove or cave to 
the stately temple ; the tribal communions to 
the solemn mysteries graced with art and song ; 
ceremonies are multiplied, and sacrifices offered 
with grander pomp and circumstance. Nor 
did the progress of enlightenment as we may 
trace it in the various religious books of India, 
Persia, China, and Egypt in any way diminish 
the importance of this material side of religion. 
It led to that clearer distinction between sym- 
bols and things symbolized, between external 
actions and internal motives, which attained its 
most complete expression in the Greek philoso- 
phers and Hebrew prophets. Yet even Plato, 
the great idealist, would have infinite attention 
bestowed upon the material conditions of spir- 
itual culture; and Ezekiel, the especial prophet 



152 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

of personal responsibility, with all his insistence 
upon the immediate relation of the soul to God, 
reaffirms the elaborate ritual and symbolism of 
the Temple. Thus, throughout pre-Christian 
history, the phases of man's spiritual life are 
closely connected with material forms. 

Now this connexion is often represented as 
simply and solely superstitious ; especially since 
we have been enabled to trace its evolution 
from the primitive processes of savage thought, 
in which everything is animated, and material 
objects are naturally endowed with spiritual 
meaning, because they are literally supposed to 
have souls of their own. But this misinterpre- 
tation of the principle of evolution, as if it de- 
graded all things to the level of their earliest 
form of appearance, has again and again been 
pointed out. The true teaching of evolution 
is that the higher form is implicitly contained 
in the lower, and consequently that there is 
more in the lower form than at first sight meets 
the eye. And many of the instincts of primitive 
man were truer than the explanations of them 
which he attempted to give. His judgements 
were better than his reasons. So in the present 
case : man is progressive, and his religion has 



vi] AND SACRAMENTS 153 

been the chief factor in his progress. No es- 
sential element of his religion, therefore, can 
have been wholly irrational; and a very little 
reflection will suffice to show that the connexion 
in question is an essential element in his re- 
ligion. For spirit, as we have seen above, is 
only known to human experience in combina- 
tion with matter, and primitive thought scarcely 
distinguishes the two. When therefore a sav- 
age believes in gods and spirits, who act upon 
him in various ways, it is inevitable that he 
should localize them in the supposed spheres 
of their activity: the forest that thrills him; 
the mountain top that awes him ; the corn and 
wine that sustain his life ; or the flash of light- 
ning that may strike him dead. This is no 
mere play of fancy, or irrational association of 
ideas: at a certain stage of culture it is a 
psychological necessity, if divine presence and 
divine action are to be realized at all. And 
when later on this crude localization gives place 
to symbolic representation, the involved prin- 
ciple is the same. It is a far cry from the 
fetish to Athene of the Parthenon ; but they 
both result from the like inability to realize 
spirit apart from matter. 



154 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

But the relation of gods to men is only one 
side of religion; there is also the relation of 
men to the gods ; and this again, if it is to be 
real, must issue in physical action. Thus the 
partaking in the tribal communion, the offer- 
ing of sacrifice with its prescribed ritual, the 
due performance of epochal ceremonies, the 
observance of taboo, constitute the practical 
religion of an early race. Such things may 
seem to us unspiritual, and so of course to 
a great extent they were; the external action 
being all that was thought of, e0o$ avev faXoao- 
fyCas as Plato calls it. But they were the 
necessary means by which spiritual life first 
came to recognize itself ; they called the will 
into play, and thus actualized religion; they 
kept ordinary life under a control, which was 
ultimately spiritual, however dimly understood 
as such, and which therefore contained the 
potency of all its subsequent development; 
while for the higher minds they were the in- 
evitable stepping-stones to the higher forms of 
conduct. It is a mistake therefore to regard 
the association of religious belief and practice 
with material things as inevitably superstitious 
or irrational ; for it is founded on a psycho- 



vi] AND SACRAMENTS 155 

logical necessity, from which there is no pos- 
sibility of escape, in a world where spirit can 
only be realized through matter. Such associa- 
tion is of course a fruitful parent of supersti- 
tion, when its underlying religion degenerates; 
but it is, nevertheless, the natural method by 
which religious progress has been made. Nor 
is it always possible, in a given case, to say 
where superstition began and progress ended, 
for the simple reason that we cannot replace 
ourselves either on the intellectual or moral 
level of the remote past. 

Jacob's anointing of the stone at Bethel, 
where he dreamed of heaven, is an illustration 
of our point. It is a familiar instance of a 
custom once common the whole world over, 
and which has left its memorials in every 
land, degenerating at last into mere supersti- 
tion. But in Jacob's case it is connected with 
a spiritual crisis in which a deeply religious 
character was deeply moved, and shows us 
how much reality may often underlie such 
customs. Indeed the Old Testament is full 
of instances to the point : ceremonies like cir- 
cumcision, or the blood-anointing of the pass- 
over, or the dismissal of the scapegoat, are 



156 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

paralleled by modern anthropologists in every 
quarter of the globe, and can perhaps be 
traced to what are intellectually very crude 
conceptions, for their rise. But in the Old 
Testament we see with what profound spirit- 
ual significance they were capable of being 
invested, and of how much real religious de- 
velopment they may have been the vehicles; 
and though these may be extreme cases, we 
may reasonably assume that similar feelings 
occurred elsewhere; and that many a relic, 
which now only excites antiquarian interest 
in a museum, was once a spiritual symbol, an 
element in some soul's tragedy, charged with 
all the pathos of religious hopes and fears. 

But the same line of thought will carry us 
further. The spiritual meaning, of which we 
have been speaking as connected with material 
things, is usually regarded as subjective and 
due to a more or less arbitrary association of 
ideas. But we have already had occasion to 
remark that the separation of subject and object 
is easier in language than in fact. The most 
intelligible sense which we have been able to 
give to ' reality ' is permanent relation to a per- 
son or persons. If therefore a particular person 



vi] AND SACRAMENTS 157 

realizes the divine presence, which we believe 
to be latent everywhere, with exceptional vivid- 
ness in a particular place, does not this con- 
stitute an actual manifestation of God to that 
person in that place ? For in what sense can 
it be said that God is not really present, when 
we apprehend His presence to such good pur- 
pose, that the whole of our subsequent conduct 
is coloured by the fact ? The same could not 
of course be said of a being who was not omni- 
present, or immanent throughout the universe. 
But a Being who is omnipresent is, vi termini, 
present at all times and in all places. When 
therefore He is recognized at a particular time 
or place, the recognition is not imaginary but 
real. He is there and causes His own recogni- 
tion, or reveals Himself. So far indeed from 
God's universal immanence being incompatible 
with such particular presence, as is sometimes 
mistakenly supposed, it is the natural and nec- 
essary presupposition of it. Because God is 
everywhere, He can appear anywhere ; while 
because man is not everywhere, but limited to 
a particular time and place, his relation to God 
must be realized under the like particular con- 
ditions. 



158 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

' Earth's crammed with heaven, 
And every common bush afire with God ; 
But only he who sees takes off his shoes, 
The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries, 
And daub their natural faces unaware 
More and more from the first similitude.' 1 

Now if religion be true at all, if there be any- 
such relation of God to man, as the human race 
has always, in one form or another, believed, 
this psychological necessity for its material ex- 
pression is an additional argument for the 
Incarnation. For the most perfect organ of 
material expression is confessedly the human 
body : and we cannot but assume that if God 
really desires intercourse with man, He will 
adopt its most perfect means. And thus again 
from this fresh point of view the Incarnation 
is antecedently probable : while, as we have 
said in another context, once grant the proba- 
bility, and the life of Christ becomes its obvious 
fulfilment. 

The life of Christ in the flesh then, as Chris- 
tians regard it, is the visible and tangible mani- 
festation ('that which we have seen and our 
hands have handled ') of God's true relation to 

1 E. B. Browning, Aurora Leigh. 



■ vi] AND SACRAMENTS 159 

man, and man's due relation to God. It thus 
sanctions the instinctive tendency that we have 
traced in every stage of culture, to realize this 
double relation by material means ; and at the 
same time sublimates those means to a power 
of spiritual expression which they never pos- 
sessed before. 

In the first place the life of Christ shows us 
the human body in a new light ; shows us how 
that body of flesh and blood, which even Plato 
called a prison, may be the intimate ally as well 
as the adequate organ of the soul. For the 
body of Christ was not merely the instrument 
of His intercourse with men. It was that, with 
its gracious presence, its healing touch, its tears 
of sympathy, its words and looks of love and 
warning, or of righteous indignation. But it 
was more than that : an integral element in His 
life and work. He controls its appetites under 
temptation ; He goes about when weary doing 
good; He foresees yet faces suffering; He 
masters pain to speak words of kindness ; He 
accepts death by crucifixion. And these things 
do not merely show, they actually make His 
human character. The stress and strain of 
them fashions and forms it — matter thus con- 



160 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

tributing to shape the interior life which it also 
serves to express. And thus we see that the 
bodily organism, so far from being a hindrance, 
is an essential ingredient in the progressive 
development of holy personality. 

Then there is Christ's attitude towards nature, 
and the external world : He declares that God 
is omnipresent in it. Heaven is God's throne 
and the earth is His footstool; and without 
Him not a sparrow falls on the ground. Con- 
sequently, we are to see in it the proof of 
God's care and love. ' Behold the fowls of the 
air . . . your heavenly Father feedeth them.' 
'Consider the lilies of the field.' 'If God so 
clothe the grass of the field, shall He not much 
more clothe you ? ' ' He maketh His sun to 
rise upon the evil and the good, and sendeth 
rain upon the just and on the unjust' Thus 
natural religion, as obviously flowing from the 
primary aspect of the material world, is the 
very starting-point and basis of Christ's teach- 
ing. But not less striking is His emphatic 
sanction of what we have called its secondary 
religious use, by the constant investiture of 
earthly objects with a spiritual significance. 
Salt, light, wheat, tares, mustard-seed, leaven, 



vi] AND SACRAMENTS 161 

pearls of price, the sheepfold, the vineyard, 
the harvest, the sunset, the lightning shining 
from the east unto the west, are all pressed 
into the service of the spirit. Everywhere He 
'touches things common till they rise to touch 
the spheres.' And not only so, but He uses 
language that suggests a deep meaning for all 
this. Earthly things symbolize spiritual, be- 
cause they come from one author and are the 
expression of one mind, which repeats its crea- 
tive phrases in a succession of ascending keys. 
Hence every lower foreshadows a higher in 
which its meaning is fulfilled, ' No chaffinch but 
implies the cherubim.' Thus the clothing of 
the grass and the feeding of the ravens are 
prophetic of the clothing and feeding of man. 
And the disciples are said to be the salt of the 
earth, the light of the world, labourers in the 
harvest, fishers of men, because they literally 
repeat the selfsame functions in a higher plane 
of existence ; while finally Christ speaks of 
Himself not as resembling, but as being the 
veritable vine, the veritable bread, the veritable 
light of the world; implying that He is the 
absolute truth of all these things ; the supreme 
reality which they partially manifest in their 



1 62 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

several spheres ; the actual source of all mate- 
rial nutrition and illumination, as well as the 
spiritual life and light of men. 

Nor does He only use symbolical language : 
His life is full of symbolical action. He was 
baptized ; He was anointed ; He put forth His 
hand and touched the leper ; He sighed and 
said Ephphatha ; He spat and made clay and 
anointed the eyes of the blind ; He stooped 
and wrote on the ground ; He lifted up His eyes 
to heaven ; He made a scourge of small cords ; 
He washed His disciples' feet ; He breathed on 
them; He lifted up His hands and blessed 
them. And He died by the only mode of death 
which could be visibly portrayed for ever, with 
all its profound appeal, to the eyes of men. 
Lastly, He ordained sacraments ; selecting, as 
their media, the two simplest, most symbolical, 
most universal religious rites, the sacred ablu- 
tion, and the sacred feast. Both these things 
were familiar to the world, as we have seen, and 
had their place under all kinds of religion. He 
raised and re-enacted them in their purest forms 
to be thenceforward means of union with Him- 
self ; and thus gave final recognition to the law 
we have traced by which matter is made minis- 
trant to spiritual life. 



vi] AND SACRAMENTS 163 

Now when we review the life and teaching of 
Christ, we see at once upon what condition this 
ministry of matter takes place ; what it is that 
makes it religious and not superstitious, pro- 
gressive and not retrograde. The condition is 
that matter be always subordinate to spirit. We 
see this first in the bodily life. ' Man doth not 
live by bread alone ' — ' My meat is to do the 
will of Him that sent Me ' — that is the princi- 
ple by which the body becomes a spiritual 
instrument. And in proportion as it is forgot- 
ten, and bodily appetite is viewed as an end 
instead of a means, the body ceases to be the 
spirit's organ, and becomes first its prison, and 
then its grave. The man loses his power of 
self-determination, the distinctive characteristic 
of spirit, and is inevitably determined from with- 
out; till he ends by becoming the mechanical 
automaton (the man machine) that materialism 
believes him always to be. 

So with the parabolic teaching, there are 
those who see but do not perceive, because 
they cannot rise above the level of the letter 
which killeth — killeth, that is, if it is not risen 
above. While the forms of phrase which we 
have noticed above seem expressly designed 



1 64 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

to emphasize the supremacy of the spiritual 
element. I am, not I am like, the good shep- 
herd, the door, the way, the vine ; as though 
to say, I am the reality, before which the image 
sinks into unimportance ; or again, the fields 
are ripe already to harvest, the real fields to the 
real harvest — and ye are, not ye are like, the 
salt of the earth, the light of the world. And 
in like manner in the matter of ordinances: 
'the sabbath,' we are told, 'was made for man, 
not man for the sabbath.' ' It is the spirit 
that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing.' 
'The words that I speak unto you, they are 
spirit, and they are truth.' 

Thus we see that the immemorial union of 
matter and spirit in religion was emphatically 
sanctioned by the practice and precept of Christ; 
while the complete subordination of the former 
to the latter was declared to be the condition of 
its legitimacy — the sole condition on which 
the functions of either could be duly fulfilled. 
And when we turn to Christian history we see 
the full effect of this. 

In the first place there is the treatment of the 
human body; — that body which had so often 
previously been despised in theory and indulged 



vi] AND SACRAMENTS 165 

in practice, that it had come to be the very 
enemy of the soul. Christianity changed all 
this. It swept away the sham contempt of the 
philosophers, and exalted the body to a position 
of unique dignity, by declaring it to be the 
temple of the Holy Ghost ; while for the same 
reason It curbed its indulgence by showing that 
temperance and chastity are parts of the rev- 
erence due to so august a thing. It thus unified 
body and soul, as It unified the other elements 
of human personality; and all subsequent mo- 
rality was coloured by the fact. The body lost 
its false independence, and reverted to its true 
function ; while as the body grew more obedi- 
ent, the spirit in proportion grew more free, as 
having an adequate instrument for all its uses 
at command. The realization of this ideal could 
not of course be accomplished without a struggle, 
and in that struggle the mortification of the 
body was carried at times too far. But neither 
the theoretical nor the practical excesses of 
particular ascetics can conceal from us the gen- 
eral aim of the Christian society at large ; which 
was to restore body and soul to their true rela- 
tion of harmonious unity, by investing the body 
with the sacrosanctity of the soul which it sub- 



1 66 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

served. Hence we find in early Christian 
teaching great stress laid on bodily behaviour 
— sobriety, modesty, seemliness of posture and 
gesture and voice and dress, — gentle manners, 
in short, of every kind, and upon every occa- 
sion, as becoming the visible manifestation of 
the Christian soul ; while the same thought, 
further emphasized by the hope of resurrection, 
led to increased tenderness and reverence in the 
treatment of the dead. Thus the place of the 
body in human personality, its intimate con- 
nexion with our inmost self, and consequent 
participation in all the phases of our moral and 
religious life, was recognized as it had never 
been before. 

Then there is the sacramental system to 
which baptism and the eucharist gave rise. 
This was not of course as elaborate at first as 
in process of time it came to be ; nor do we find 
in the early church those definitions and distinc- 
tions to which subsequent controversy led. But 
we see clearly that from the very first, the mate- 
rial elements of these two sacraments were inti- 
mately connected in the Christian consciousness 
with the grace which they conveyed. The 
early fathers dwell not only on baptism, but on 



vi] AND SACRAMENTS 167 

the water of baptism, that ' water united to the 
word,' as Clement calls it (vBcop \oyitcov), 'the 
blessed sacrament of water ' (felix sacramentum 
aquae), which has an angel of its own like that 
of Bethesda, in Tertullian' s belief. Tertullian 
indeed goes so far as to say of his own treatise 
upon baptism, ' I am afraid that I may seem 
rather to have been accumulating the praises of 
water than the reasons for baptism.' It is once 
called by Origen a symbol; but plainly for 
most it was more than this — a symbol pene- 
trated and transfused by the illuminating pres- 
ence of what it symbolized, and therefore a 
holy thing. So too with the eucharistic ele- 
ments. Ignatius calls the eucharist 'the flesh 
of our Saviour Jesus Christ.' Justin Martyr, 
' no common bread or drink . . . but the flesh 
and blood of the incarnate Jesus.' Irenaeus, 
'no longer common bread, but the eucharist, 
consisting of two things, an earthly and a 
heavenly.' ' We are distressed,' says Tertullian, 
' if aught of the chalice or bread fall upon the 
ground.' Such expressions would have to be 
qualified, if we were discussing the precise doc- 
trine of the early church, by others from Clem- 
ent, Origen, and the Greek fathers ; but they 



1 68 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

suffice to show from how early a date the mate- 
rial elements of the eucharist were regarded as, 
to say the least, of a peculiar sanctity, though 
its precise nature had not as yet been critically 
denned. Here then we have a parallel to the 
Christian view of the human body — water and 
bread and wine, raised to a position of new 
dignity as vehicles of a spiritual benediction 
upon men ; while the entire dependence of 
their value, upon the spirit with which they 
were linked, is at the same time clearly and 
emphatically maintained. 

But these new sacraments had, as we have 
seen, like all things else, a history. They date 
back to primaeval religion, and are the off- 
spring of earlier rites, rites which in the course 
of ages had acquired their appropriate cere- 
monial. Hence it was not unnatural that in 
the process of time the Christian sacraments 
should attract to themselves the accessories of 
Jewish and Graeco-Roman worship ; postures, 
gestures, vestments, sacred symbols and uten- 
sils, solemn processions, religious music, in- 
cense, chrism, lights ; raising the old-world 
ritual to a higher and holier use. It is of 
course easy from a modern point of view to 



vi] AND SACRAMENTS 169 

regard this process as retrogressive; a return 
from Christian spirituality to Jewish and pagan 
materialism. But as a matter of fact, this is far 
too narrow and unsympathetic a judgement. 
All religion as it becomes popular is apt to be 
degraded ; and the Christian sacraments were 
undoubtedly degraded in their popular use. 
But on the other hand, all religion has and 
must have its material side. This material side 
of religion is its body, its necessary organ of 
expression and manifestation, and has persisted 
in unbroken continuity from the earliest days. 
Every successive religion has entered upon 
some part or other of this common heritage, 
this great ritual tradition ; elevating, inspiring, 
improving, it may be, but still using the time- 
honoured forms. And Christianity, with its 
world-wide appeal to all races and classes of 
mankind, could be no exception to the rule. 
Moreover the Incarnation was, by its very 
nature, as we have been arguing above, the 
final sanction and justification of this great 
principle in things ; the extreme recognition of 
the fact that the all spiritual truth must be 
embodied in material form. Had Christianity 
been merely a spiritual religion — supposing 



170 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

such a thing possible — and subsequently- 
adopted sacraments, this might conceivably 
have been called a decline. But the religion of 
the Incarnation could not possibly be merely 
spiritual. It not only started with sacraments 
from its very origin, but it was essentially and 
fundamentally sacramental to the core. For 
what is the Incarnation itself but a sacrament, 
the sum and substance of all sacraments ? 
When therefore theologians called baptism and 
the eucharist extensions of the Incarnation, 
they were using no rhetorical metaphors ; they 
were literally and accurately correct. For 
these ordinances, with the sacramental network 
which insensibly gathered round them, were the 
means and witness of that consecration of the 
body, as an integral element in our whole per- 
sonality, which it had been the work of the 
Incarnation to effect. And it was inevitable, in 
accordance with all laws of historic evolution, 
that these sacraments once instituted, should 
gradually clothe themselves with the colours 
and associations of those earlier rites which, in 
the deepest sense, they came not to destroy but 
to fulfil. Thus the growth of the sacramental 
system was an historical necessity; which, 



vi] AND SACRAMENTS 171 

despite of the religious materialism into which 
it too frequently lapsed, was part and parcel of 
that great reclamation of the material world for 
God, which began with the Word made Flesh. 

And this naturally leads our thoughts to the 
influence of Christianity upon art. The con- 
nexion of art and religion was a thing of im- 
memorial age : — 

' Pictores quis nescit ab Iside pasci.' 

And we are not surprised to see how soon, in 
the catacombs, art was pressed into the Chris- 
tian service. But fierce controversies had to 
rage, before art was made finally at home in 
the Church. The Iconoclasts felt its danger, 
and protested against its use, with a puritan 
austerity which cannot but command our re- 
spect. But Iconoclasm was foredoomed to 
failure by the very nature of the case. For 
what has been said of the sacramental system 
applies equally to art. The Incarnation in- 
volved artistic development as part of its 
redemption of the material world, its restora- 
tion of matter to the service of the spirit. And 
accordingly the note of all great Christian art 
is the subordination of material beauty to spir- 



172 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

itual use. Of course all Christian art was not 
great; and where religion was degenerate or 
taste degraded, we meet with bloodstained 
crucifixions and realistic martyrdoms which are 
as hideously inartistic as they are alien to the 
true spirit of Christianity. And equally, of 
course, all great art was not Christian ; when 
pursued, in modern phrase, for art's sake, 
colour and form and impression becoming ends 
in themselves. But this does not alter the 
fact that the religion of the Incarnation 
breathed a new life into art, and endowed it 
with new power over the thoughts and affec- 
tions of men. 

First and foremost there are the Gothic 
cathedrals, 

' Everlasting piles 
Types of the spiritual church which God hath reared. 

Where bubbles burst, and folly's dancing foam 
Melts, if it cross the threshold ; where the wreath 
Of awe-struck wisdom droops.' x 

Stone seems in them to lose its stubborn nature, 
as it soars, in obedience, tier over tier, to the 
infinite aspiration of the soul. 

1 Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Sketches. 



vi] AND SACRAMENTS 173 

' With living wiles 
Instinct — to rouse the heart and lead the will 
By a bright ladder to the world above.' * 

They are perhaps the most striking instance 
of spirit's power to subdue matter, since 
it is matter of the most obstinate, con- 
crete, solid kind which is thus subdued. But 
the same is the case with Christian painting, in 
a still subtler degree; Cimabue, Giotto, and 
their followers not only raised and dignified 
pictorial art, by their dedication of brush and 
pencil to the Christian service; but, in so doing, 
they discovered in it new depths of possibility, 
wholly unsuspected capacities of spiritual ex- 
pression, fresh powers in the sensuous image to 
show the innermost secrets of the soul. 

1 The early painters, 

To cries of " Greek Art and what more wish you? " 
Replied, " To become now self-acquainters, 

And paint man, man, whatever the issue ! 
Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray, 

New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters : 
To bring the invisible full into play ! 

Let the visible go to the dogs — what matters ? ' 2 

1 Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Sketches. 

2 Browning, Old Pictures in Florence. 



174 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

It is the same, again, with music, which may 
be called pre-eminently the Christian art. For 
whatever earlier traditions paved the way for it, 
the development of music from the Gregorian 
age to that of Handel and Bach was virtually 
a new creation. It arose out of the Christian 
worship, under the Christian inspiration, and 
was matured by Christian artists, and for Chris- 
tian use. Not unnaturally therefore it is the 
art in which matter is most completely sub- 
ordinate to spirit. For sound, as it floats upon 
the viewless air, can scarcely be called a ma- 
terial thing. Its mechanical origin is forgotten 
in its invisible effect. And when these airy, 
unsubstantial, wandering tones are caught by 
the musician and transfigured with the magic 
of his art, they seem to lose the last lingering 
remnant of material restraint. Wherever the 
spirit ranges, music is free to follow. No joy 
is too ecstatic, no sorrow too deep, no action too 
impetuous, no passion too intense, no phase of 
thought or feeling too rare, to come within its 
scope. It thrills and throbs with every move- 
ment of the life which it interprets and reveals. 
And we feel that matter can go no further; 
it has reached its limit; it has become, as 



vi] AND SACRAMENTS 175 

Hegel truly says, independent of space and 
time : — 

i Miserere, Domine I 
The words are utter'd, and they flee. 
Deep is their penitential moan, 
Mighty their pathos, but 'tis gone. 
They have declared the spirit's sore 
Sore load, and words can do no more. 
Beethoven takes them then — those two 
Poor, bounded words — and makes them new; 
Infinite makes them, makes them young ; 
Transplants them to another tongue, 
Where they can now, without constraint, 
Pour all the soul of their complaint, 
And roll adown a channel large 
The wealth divine they have in charge. 
Page after page of music turn, 
And still they live and still they burn, 
Perennial, passion-fraught, and free — 
Miserere, Domine ! ' 1 

The arts indeed, as they have reached their 
maturity, have acquired an independent life of 
their own, and are no longer so obviously con- 
nected with the Christian worship, or illumined 
by the Christian faith, as once they were. But 
this apparent secularity, if art can ever be called 
secular, must not blind us to the essential sacred- 

1 Matthew Arnold, Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoon. 



176 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

ness of all true art, and to the fact that it arose 
in sacred places, and was destined for a sacred 
use. It is, as we now possess it, a gift of Chris- 
tianity to the world ; just as our common moral- 
ity, which is now public property, the possession 
of believers and unbelievers alike, — and which 
is often credited, in consequence, with a secular 
origin, — really grew up under Christian influ- 
ence, and was fostered by Christian devotion till 
it grew strong enough in the end to stand alone. 

Thus the religion of the Incarnation raised 
the sacramental and artistic capabilities of matter 
to a new level, as it raised the human body itself; 
making them minister to that 'coming of the 
kingdom of God,' that development of a society 
of holy persons, whose object was to regenerate 
the world. 

Hence the religious effect of art and sacra- 
ment is the reproduction, on a higher plane, of 
that same influence which we have seen the 
mere spectacle of the world to exert. It is the 
religious influence of material nature, focussed, 
localized, intensified, by the conscious interven- 
tion of man ; precisely as the natural forces of 
heat and light and electricity are focussed and 
localized by human agency, to be turned to 
human use. 



vi] AND SACRAMENTS 177 

It follows that the spiritual influence of art 
and sacrament must be as real — in modern 
phrase as objectively real — as that of nature, 
which they do but emphasize. We have argued 
at length that the religious influence of nature 
is too obviously real to be attributed to mere 
subjective sentiment, mere feeling without objec- 
tive counterpart ; and that it must be conceived 
of as the divine omnipresence making itself felt. 
When therefore we emphasize this presence, 
either by the help of inspired genius, as in the 
arts, or in a higher and more solemn way, by cele- 
bration of the sacraments ordained by Christ, 
the like reality must attach to those points of 
emphasis. Carlyle speaks of art as 'eternity 
looking through time ' ; Newman of music as 
'the outpourings of eternal harmony in the 
medium of created sound ' ; Browning as 

1 A flash of the will that can, 
Existent behind all laws, that made them, and lo 
they are.' 1 

And these are more than rhetorical phrases. 
They express the common conviction of serious 
minds, that just as science does not invent but 

1 Browning, Abt Vogler. 

N 



178 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

discovers the laws of the material world, so 
art does not create but reveals the truth of 
spiritual things. There is a spiritual power in 
the universe to illuminate our minds, to en- 
kindle our hearts, and to stir our wills; and 
the genius of the artist is among the instru- 
ments through which this spirit speaks. 

And what is true of art is from the Christian 
point of view still more true of sacraments. 
We cannot indeed, and need not, define the 
method of their operation, as rival theologians 
have so often attempted to do. For we know 
nothing of the ultimate nature of either of their 
elements, nor how those elements, even in our 
own persons, are combined. And this is the 
point which is really involved, rather than any 
strictly theological issue, in all the various sac- 
ramental theories, which lie between the poles 
of Zwingli and the Council of Trent. But, 
however we regard them, the fact remains that 
the sacraments were selected and ordained by 
Christ to be means, in one way or another, 
of union and communion with Himself. Had 
they been arbitrarily chosen things, we might 
perhaps have been content to call them sym- 
bols. But they are very far indeed, as we 



vi] AND SACRAMENTS 179 

have seen, from being arbitrary inventions. 
They have a history behind them as old as 
humanity, and a context around them as wide 
as the world ; and point us back to sacramental 
customs of immemorial age. And if these 
earlier rites derived reality and value from 
God's immanence in the world, and found Him 
at particular times and places because He is 
everywhere present and ready to be found, the 
Christian sacraments must possess this reality 
in its highest degree. While in their case it 
is further fortified by the fact that they are 
divine commands ; and carry with them the 
direct promise of a personal response to the 
personal allegiance which they claim ; the prom- 
ise not that God may be found, but that He 
will definitely meet us, at the time and in the 
place of His appointment. Thus the sacra- 
ments, in our Christian view of them, are the 
key to the material world, as the means of 
union with the supreme reality, the personal 
God ; while the form of them — an ablution 
and a meal — our simplest bodily needs — re- 
minds us that our bodies are an integral ele- 
ment in that entire personality, whose destiny 
is union with the Word made Flesh. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE INCARNATION AND THE TRINITY 

IT will have been observed that the preceding 
pages are in no way intended to summarize 
the general evidence for the truth of the Incar- 
nation ; which is a thing that must be studied 
in its full detail in order to be felt with its full 
weight. Their object in dealing with the Incar- 
nation has merely been to vindicate and empha- 
size one of its aspects ; its place, namely, in our 
philosophy of nature, its relation to our convic- 
tion of God's immanence in the natural world. 
But all attempts to present religious doctrine in 
a philosophical connexion run a certain risk of 
conveying the impression that it is only philo- 
sophical — a speculative suggestion, an intellect- 
ual after-thought, an unsubstantial vision in the 
air. And such impression is doubly dangerous, 
in the present day, from the fact, that it may 
seem to give colour to the commonest form of 
contemporaneous attack on Christianity; which 

represents the Incarnation, with the Trinitarian 
180 



[chap. vii] INCARNATION AND THE TRINITY 181 

theology that it involves, as metaphysical cor- 
ruptions of what was once a simpler creed. It 
may be advisable therefore, as a safeguard, as 
well as a confirmation of what has gone before, 
to point out the practical character of both these 
doctrines, as well as the practical method of 
their introduction to the world. 

' Faithful souls,' says St. Hilary of Poitiers, 
* would be contented with the word of God, 
which bids us "Go teach all nations, baptizing 
them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, 
and of the Holy Ghost." ' ' But alas ! ' he con- 
tinues, ' we are driven by the faults of our heret- 
ical opponents to do things unlawful, to scale 
heights inaccessible, to speak out what is 
unspeakable, to presume where we ought not. 
And whereas it is by faith alone that we should 
worship the Father, and reverence the Son, and 
be filled with the Spirit, we are now obliged to 
strain our weak human language in the utter- 
ance of things beyond its scope ; forced into this 
evil procedure by the evil procedure of our foes. 
Hence, what should be matter of silent religious 
meditation must now needs be imperilled by ex- 
position in words.' 



182 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

This passage is from the first great dogmatic 
treatise of the Christian Church, that of St. Hil- 
ary on the Trinity ; and it is admirably typical 
of the patristic attitude towards all dogmatic 
definition. The fathers, unlike the schoolmen, 
had no love of it ; they recognized its occasional 
necessity, but recognized it, for the most part, 
with regret ; and never without a sense that the 
ground they trod was holy ground, the mysteries 
they handled, things of awe. Accordingly, it 
will be noticed that Hilary here, like Augustine 
after him, bases the doctrine of the Trinity 
entirely on a simple fact, — namely, the baptis- 
mal formula of the Christian Church ; which 
from the first must have carried with it some 
traditional interpretation, yet which confessedly 
has nothing metaphysical about it. This form 
of words presided over the greatest change 
that has occurred in history, and it is obvious 
that sooner or later it would have had to be 
explained. But the process of this explanation 
lies open before us in its every stage ; and it is 
perfectly plain that from first to last it was 
regarded as the interpretation of a revealed fact. 
The incessant appeal is to what the Scripture 
says, or what the saying of the Scripture means. 



vii] AND THE TRINITY 183 

No speculative element is introduced at any 
point : and the resulting creeds are nothing 
more than the authorized epitomes of what, in 
the view of their composers, the Gospels con- 
tain. Concrete facts, when they are translated 
into the terms of science or philosophy, look 
very unlike themselves. A daisy, for example, 
is not like its botanical description, nor a sonata 
like its musical score. And so the simple pass- 
word that gives entrance to a worldwide family, 
will naturally differ from the intellectual state- 
ment of what a great religion means. 

Viewed, then, in the light of its history, the 
doctrine of the Trinity is no metaphysical inven- 
tion like the Platonic ' ideas ' or the Aristotelian 
' form ' ; but simply the expression in philosophi- 
cal language of what had entered the world as a 
statement of fact — the fact that there is plural- 
ity, triune plurality in God. And though at first 
sight this might seem a mystery too tran- 
scendental to be worth revelation, its revelation 
was in fact a thing of the profoundest practical 
import. 

' I am come that they might have life,' said 
Jesus Christ, ' and that they might have it more 
abundantly.' Truer, fuller, fairer life is the ulti- 



1 84 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

mate issue of the religion of the cross ; no mere 
theory, but a plain, palpable, practical result. 
Yet the entire possibility of this result depended 
upon such an increased knowledge of God's 
nature as should enable a clearer comprehension 
of His whole relationship to man. ' God is lov- 
ing,' had been said by others before the time of 
Jesus Christ, but never ' God is Love ' ; and there 
is a world of difference between the two propo- 
sitions. The statement of the psalmist, that 
' God is loving unto every man,' does not of 
necessity imply that love is more than what 
may be called a relative and secondary attribute 
of God ; an affection elicited by the existence, 
the ephemeral existence of His creatures, and 
which, apart from that existence, would cease 
to operate, and therefore to be. God in His 
unknown essence might still be something 
other than Love, but the statement that ' God is 
Love ' is very different from this : it is a real 
revelation beyond all that we could otherwise 
have learned ; it lifts Love at once into the ab- 
solute, as the essential and eternal cause of all, 
thereby exhibiting the whole world in a new 
light. For there is all the difference between 
a mysterious, unintelligible universe, whose 



vii] AND THE TRINITY 185 

fathomless depths are never pierced by the un- 
certain gleams of love, which play fitfully from 
time to time upon their face, and one whose 
first and final cause, whose very root and ground 
is love ; one amid whose mysteries we can there- 
fore move with confidence, and whose unsolved 
problems we can face with hope. 

But if love is to be thought of as thus abso- 
lute, or in other words synonymous with God, 
as distinct from being merely contingent on 
creation, there must of necessity be conceived a 
plurality of persons in the Godhead ; for when 
we speak of love we mean the affection of one 
person for another, and except it be taken in 
that sense, the word is utterly and blankly mean- 
ingless. If, therefore, the proclamation that 
God is Love does not mean this, it has no more 
value or significance than that the unknown is 
the unknowable. 

Hence if human life was to be renewed, and 
human society reconstructed on the basis of the 
faith that ' God is Love,' there was paramount 
need that enough of the veil should be lifted 
from the Godhead to assure us that those words 
really meant what they must inevitably appear 
to mean. Thus, what is often misrepresented 



1 86 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

as a speculative superfluity turns out upon anal- 
ysis to be the most practical of truths. 

To say this is not, of course, to imply that 
intellectual illumination was the primary object 
of the Christian religion, but merely that Chris- 
tianity could not have been taught along the ages, 
without some such illumination of the intellect 
as that by which, in fact, it was accompanied. 

Hence this illumination has always been 
regarded as an integral portion of the Christian 
Creed, enhancing and not diminishing its prac- 
tical efficiency, by including head as well as 
heart in its appeal. For it supplies us with an 
analogy that we can follow out in thought. 
The fairest thing we know on earth, the truest 
practical solution of life's problem, is a society 
or family whose members are united by a com- 
mon bond of love. Within the charmed circle, 
such love is reflected from each to all and all to 
each, and gathers in the process an intimate 
intensity, far beyond all power to express ; 
while, to those who are without, it ever burns 
to impart some fragment of its own inspiring 
energy and joy, by thoughts of tenderness and 
words of sympathy, and deeds of kindly care. 

Here, then, we have a picture drawn from the 



vii] AND THE TRINITY 187 

noblest thing we know, which illustrates, how- 
ever feebly, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, 
that Divine Society, whose co-equal members are 
one in infinite eternal love, and who in that love's 
exuberance come forth, in a sense, from out 
themselves, to create, to sustain, to redeem, to 
sanctify, to bless. 

It must not for a moment be supposed that 
we can follow this analogy in detail, or that it 
does not still leave much that is obscure. The 
human picture melts away into the light that no 
man can approach unto. The Father remains 
incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, 
and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible. Such 
has always been the language of the Church. 
In a word, her doctrine is sufficient to make our 
thought of God more full, more real, more ade- 
quate to influence human life ; while in contrast 
with all philosophies which attempt to criticize 
the Absolute, it leaves His ineffable mystery 
alone. Those philosophies, on the other hand, 
have never succeeded in presenting us with 
either a likelier or a clearer conception of God ; 
while in power to control conduct, to console 
sorrow, to develop life, they are immeasurably 
surpassed by the Christian creed. 



1 88 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

And this is after all the true test of a theol- 
ogy : the extent and character of its influence 
on life. For no modern form of Theism views 
God as a mere logical abstraction, whose unity- 
can only be maintained by isolation from the 
world. However variously men think about 
Him, in the present day, they would at least 
agree that He must be regarded as the real, 
concrete, source and ground and goal of things ; 
by His intimate, immanent omnipresence mak- 
ing the universe one whole, or in older language, 
' upholding all things ' and ' filling all in all.' 

But foremost in the universe of our expe- 
rience is man. God, even if we call Him the 
unknown, must yet be the source and ground 
and goal of human personality, and all its 
powers. If therefore He is to control His uni- 
verse, He must be able to control man in the 
precise way in which man's nature instinctively 
demands to be controlled, that is, by personal 
influence. Hence He must Himself at least be 
personal. ' Supra-personal ' is thought by some 
to be more descriptive of a personality that 
must infinitely transcend our own. And the 
term may be permissible, if it is clearly under- 
stood to imply the inclusion of the essential 



VII] AND THE TRINITY 189 

attributes of personality ; as we might call 
chemical phenomena supra-mechanical, or vital 
phenomena supra-chemical ; meaning that in 
each case the higher order included and utilized 
the lower. But in fact the term ' supra-personal ' 
is often taken to imply such an absorption of 
personality as would obliterate its distinctive 
features, much as water in absorbing a crystal 
destroys its unity and form. In this sense the 
word is merely a disguised, and therefore mis- 
leading, synonym for the plainer term ' imper- 
sonal,' of which it must in consequence share 
the fate. 

To resume then, any adequate notion that we 
can form of God must include the capacity for 
influencing persons ; and persons, in the last re- 
sort, can only be influenced by love. For appeals 
to the reason, and even appeals to the conscience, 
are partial in their effect, and do not compre- 
hend the entire man. But appeals to the heart 
compel the allegiance of our whole personality, 
and are moreover the sole form of compulsion 
to which a being endowed with freedom can, 
without loss of his integrity, submit. If therefore 
God is to be master of the human element in His 
universe, He must be so by appealing to its love. 



190 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

' For the loving worm within its clod, 
Were diviner than a loveless god 
Amid his worlds, I will dare to say.' 1 

Hence the superiority of the Christian to all 
other theologies. The God of Plato, the God 
of Aristotle, the God of Spinoza, cannot appeal 
to the heart. They cannot hold the universe 
together, for there is a thing in the universe 
which eludes their grasp ; and to that extent, 
therefore, at least, they are not gods. The 
same may be said of all unitarian or Sabellian 
conceptions. They leave no room for attribut- 
ing love, in any intelligible sense, to the divine 
nature ; and cannot therefore satisfy the crav- 
ing of humanity for union with a Being who 
loves because He must, who loves because His 
essence is love. Love, in a word, is the sole 
solution of life's problem ; and the doctrine of 
the Trinity is the sole metaphysic of love. Of 
course if it were only a metaphysical theory, it 
would have no advantage, except that of greater 
probability, over other theories ; but its distinc- 
tion is that it did not enter the world in theoretic 
but in practical form. 

1 Browning, Christmas Eve. 



vii] AND THE TRINITY 191 

Jesus Christ came speaking in simplest lan- 
guage of the love of God; and then of Himself, 
to an inner circle, as the proof and exhibition of 
that love ; and then of those relationships within 
the Godhead which made His Incarnation possi- 
ble in fact, and capable of being in a measure 
comprehended in thought. And there is con- 
gruity in this. True love does not speak with- 
out acting; and the proclamation that God is 
love would have been self-contradictory, if it 
had not been accompanied by its own practical 
proof. The fact of the Incarnation came first, 
and then its doctrine ; but the two involve and 
presuppose each other. Now men forget this 
fact when they speak lightly of the doctrine of 
the Trinity, as if it were a mere speculative 
paradox, wholly out of relation to the practical 
needs of a practical age; they forget that it 
supports and is supported by the whole weight 
of a fact in history, with which nothing else in 
the wide world can even for a moment be com- 
pared. That fact is the age-long empire of 
Jesus Christ over the hearts of men. The 
picture of that empire has been drawn with 
unrivalled power, and its significance pressed 
home with unanswerable logic, by the great 



192 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

French preacher of our age; but nevertheless 
in much current controversy its evidential value 
is ignored. Yet there it is, an unique fact, that 
has lasted now through nineteen centuries, and 
is, without question, as energetic in the world 
to-day, as in any bygone age. The survey of 
man's nature assures us that its only key is 
love, and we are forced to infer that if God con- 
trols the universe by laws appropriate to its 
modes of being, He must draw humanity by the 
cords of a man, that is by the law of love. One 
has come, claiming to be God made manifest, — 
manifest in order to attract our love. He has 
attracted and retained it, — 'with limitations,' it 
will be said. Yes, with limitations, but limita- 
tions which Himself predicted as exactly as 
He predicted the attraction that should know 
no end. So that, in fact, the perpetual miracle 
of the love that He inspires is enhanced by the 
prophetic power that foretold its course. 

This then is the position of the Christian 
theology. It presents us with a doctrine of 
God, which, while claiming to be revealed, 
justifies the claim by being clearer than any 
adverse view. And moreover it presents this 
doctrine supported by a great historic fact — 



vii] AND THE TRINITY 193 

the greatest, the most wonderful, the most im- 
portant fact in history. This fact, the empire 
of Christ, so supernatural and yet so human, 
presupposes the truth of the doctrine, and 
could not otherwise have come to pass ; while 
on the other hand the doctrine finds its natural, 
its necessary outcome, in the historical occur- 
rence of the fact. 

Now this is a combination of theory and 
practice, thought and thing, that should appeal 
with especial power to the mind of a practical 
age. For practical men, who are in any sense 
to be worthy of the name, will be the first to 
admit that action presupposes reflection, prac- 
tice rests on principle ; while success in our 
active efforts is the gauge and guarantee of 
soundness in the thoughts from which they 
spring. Hence the supremacy of the Christian 
religion in the field of practical achievement 
should commend, to men of action, the central 
doctrine it involves. 

That it has been, and is, so supreme in 
achievement, few serious thinkers will deny. 
For it has inspired a love which, both in kind 
and degree, remains, as we have seen, unique. 
It has quickened by its presence all the forces 



194 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

that make for progress, even in what are called 
the secular movements of the world; while 
among the dim sad things of life, which no 
secular progress can remove, — poverty, pain, 
shame, sorrow, doubt, despondency, and death, 
— it reigns, as the great consoler, incontestably 
alone. 

What then is the real root of the objection to 
the doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation, 
if it is neither speculative improbability, nor 
want of practical support ? There can be little 
doubt that the secret cause of its unpopularity 
consists in its claim to be a revelation from God. 
Such a claim of course cannot fail to provoke 
antagonism in many minds, by the demand 
upon character and conduct which it inevitably 
makes ; and this antagonism may exist as an 
unconscious bias even among men, who, with- 
out being otherwise immoral, yet shrink from 
the spiritual progress that a definite revelation 
is felt to imply. But apart from this moral 
drawback, common to all ages, modern thinkers 
have an objection of their own. The unity of 
nature, they urge, and the uniform action of its 
laws, create a presumption against personal 
divine interference, of which unscientific minds 



vii] AND THE TRINITY 195 

and ages cannot appreciate the weight. With- 
out further pausing on the philosophical criti- 
cism to which this argument is open, it will 
be sufficient for our present purpose to call at- 
tention to one fact. Nature includes human 
nature ; and 

* Man, once descried, imprints for ever 
His presence on all lifeless things.' 

Human nature is an integral portion of our sum 
total of experience; and while comprising in- 
stances within itself of all the classes of phe- 
nomena that nature elsewhere exhibits in a 
wider way, — mechanism, chemistry, energy, 
organization, life, — it possesses other charac- 
teristics which are peculiarly its own. And 
while the study of external nature is confess- 
edly a thing of yesterday, the study of the hu- 
man spirit is as old as its records of itself, and 
has been conducted by many a genius, before 
which modern names grow pale. 

Now religious instincts and aspirations are, 
as is perfectly well known, among the deepest, 
the most universal, the most essential, attributes 
of man. These instincts, from time immemo- 
rial, have craved a revelation, and the Christian 
revelation meets and satisfies this craving in a 



196 THE INCARNATION [chap. 

manner and a measure that are alike unique. 
At least then it is entitled to the same consider- 
ation as would be accorded to a scientific theory, 
in parallel case. Modern science is familiar 
with theories, which are far from possibility of 
proof, and yet, from their correspondence with 
the facts of experience, are regarded as practi- 
cally true. We may reasonably claim therefore 
that if tested, as we test other hypotheses, the 
Christian revelation stands in similar case. It 
fits the facts within its province, as no other 
scheme can fit them ; and that, without conflict- 
ing with any other kinds of fact : whereas its 
rivals are all partial, and however much they 
may explain, leave life, and love, and death, 
and spiritual experience unexplained. Yet if 
the world can be explained at all, and is there- 
fore rational, as all science is bound to maintain, 
its highest product, the human spirit, must be 
rational and explicable too; and some answer 
to its aspirations, some solution of its problems, 
must exist. Why should not the one answer 
which has appeared, and is adequate, be true ? 

' So, the All- Great, were the All- Loving too — 
So, through the thunder comes a human voice 
Saying, " O heart I made, a heart beats here ! 



vii] AND THE TRINITY 197 

Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself, 
Thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of mine, 
But love I gave thee, with myself to love, 
And thou must love me who have died for thee ! " ,l 

1 Browning, An Epistle. 






APPENDIX 

I. PERSONAL IDENTITY 

* A PERSON,' says Reid, 'is something indi- 
**- visible, and is what Leibnitz calls a monad. 
My personal identity, therefore, implies the con- 
tinued existence of that indivisible thing which 
I call myself. Whatever this self may be, it is 
something which thinks, and deliberates, and 
resolves, and acts, and suffers. I am not 
thought, I am not action, I am not feeling; I 
am something that thinks, and acts, and suffers. 
My thoughts, and actions, and feelings, change 
every moment — they have no continued, but a 
successive existence ; but that self or I, to which 
they belong, is permanent, and has the same 
relation to all the succeeding thoughts, actions, 
and feelings which I call mine. . . . The 
proper evidence I have of all this is remem- 
brance. 

' The conviction which every man has of his 
identity, as far back as his memory reaches, 
199 



200 APPENDIX 

needs no aid of philosophy to strengthen it ; and 
no philosophy can weaken it, without first pro- 
ducing some degree of insanity. We probably at 
first derive our notion of identity from that nat- 
ural conviction which every man has from the 
dawn of reason of his own identity and continued 
existence. The identity which we ascribe to 
bodies ... is not perfect identity. ... It ad- 
mits of a great change of subject, provided the 
change be gradual. . . . But identity, when 
applied to persons, has no ambiguity, and 
admits not of degrees, or of more and less. It 
is the foundation of all rights and obligations, 
and of all accountableness, and the notion of 
it is fixed and precise.' (Reid, Intell. Powers ; 
hi. c. 4.) 

' When it is asked/ says Butler, ' wherein per- 
sonal identity consists, the answer should be the 
same, as if it were asked, wherein consists simili- 
tude, or equality; that all attempts to define 
would but perplex it. Yet there is no difficulty 
at all in ascertaining the idea. For as, upon 
two triangles being compared or viewed together, 
there arises to the mind the idea of similitude, 
or upon twice two and four, the idea of equality ; 



/. PERSONAL IDENTITY 201 

so likewise, upon comparing the consciousness 
of one's self, or one's own existence, in any two 
moments, there as immediately arises to the 
mind the idea of personal identity. . . . And 
though the successive consciousnesses, which 
we have of our own existence, are not the same, 
yet they are consciousnesses of one and the 
same thing or object; of the same person, self, 
or living agent. The person of whose existence 
the consciousness is felt now, and was felt an 
hour or a year ago, is discerned to be, not two 
persons, but one and the same person; and 
therefore is one and the same. . . . And one 
should really think it self-evident, that conscious- 
ness of personal identity presupposes, and there- 
fore cannot constitute, personal identity, any 
more than knowledge, in any other case, can 
constitute truth, which it presupposes.' (Of 
Personal Identity.) 

The above passages indicate with sufficient 
clearness what we mean by personal identity. 
It is a fact, thus understood, of every sane 
man's inner experience, an ultimate fact which 
we cannot get behind. Common sense and 
sound metaphysic are agreed upon the point. 



202 APPENDIX 

But there is a vague notion, in some quarters, 
that the conception of personal identity as thus 
described, has been discredited by the investi- 
gations of physiological psychology. It may be 
well therefore to point out why this is not, and, 
in the nature of things, cannot be the case. 
And this will perhaps best be seen if we con- 
front with the above passages a typical state- 
ment of the physiological point of view, from 
M. Ribot's Diseases of Personality. 

'The organism and the brain, as its highest 
representation, constitute the real personality, 
containing in itself all that we have been and 
the possibilities of all that we shall be. The 
whole individual character is inscribed there 
with all its active and passive aptitudes, sym- 
pathies, and antipathies ; its genius, talents, or 
stupidity ; its virtues, vices, torpor, or activity. 
What emerges and reaches consciousness is 
little only compared with what lies buried 
below, albeit still active. Conscious personality 
is never more than a feeble portion of physical 
personality. The unity of the ego, accordingly, 
is not that of the single entity of spiritualists, 
dispersing itself into multiple phenomena, but 



I. PERSONAL IDENTITY 203 

the co-ordination of a certain number of inces- 
santly renascent states, having for their sole 
support the vague sense of the body. This 
unity does not pass from above to below, but 
from below to above ; it is not an initial, but a 
terminal point. . . . The unity of the ego, in a 
psychological sense, is, accordingly, the cohe- 
sion, during a given period, of a certain number 
of distinct states of consciousness, accompanied 
by others less distinct, and by a multitude of 
physiological states which, though not accom- 
panied by consciousness like the others, yet 
operate as powerfully as they, if not more so. 
Unity means co-ordination.' (Ribot, Diseases 
of Personality, Eng. Trans.) 

Now the experience which this passage 
attempts to explain away, is, as above stated, 
a fact of our internal consciousness ; but the 
evidence on which the explanation rests, is a 
collection of external observations — observa- 
tions of different organic functions, effects of 
physical temperament, bodily moods, perver- 
sions of sensibility, monstrous births, diseases, 
insanity, hypnotic conditions, and the like. 

It will be obvious at a glance, therefore, that 



204 APPENDIX 

the entire passage is, from first to last, a petitio 
principii. It begs the question at issue ; as has 
always been the case, since the days when Cud- 
worth said of Hobbes and his followers, they 
'do plainly dance round in a circle.' For the 
gulf between our knowledge of matter and our 
knowledge of spirit is impassable. From the 
outside we can never see a movement think; 
and from the inside we can never feel a thought 
move. And as long as this is the case, we can 
tell absolutely nothing of the ultimate nature of 
their relationship. But this gulf, in the pas- 
sage before us, is leaped at a bound, 'The 
organism constitutes the personality/ . . . 
'The unity is not that of the spiritualists.' . . . 
'The unity of the ego is the cohesion,' etc. 
Each of these phrases is an assertion that there 
is no more in the spiritual element of personal- 
ity than can be discerned from the material side. 
And this is no accidental illogicality of the par- 
ticular writer ; it is inherent in his point of 
view. Any attempt to dissolve the unity, 
which we only know as a fact of internal con- 
sciousness, into elements which we only know 
as facts of external observation, must beg the 
question. 



/. PERSONAL IDENTITY 205 

As a matter of fact, the more cautious psy- 
chologists are aware of this, as the following 
passages from Hoffding may show : — 

' Even though the individual organism, which 
in spite of its completeness and relative inde- 
pendence is still a republic of cells, were to be 
explained as compounded out of elements, and 
its origin made intelligible through the law of 
the persistence of energy, this would not explain 
the individual consciousness, the formation of a 
special centre of memory, of action, and of suf- 
fering. That it is possible for such an inner 
centre to come into being is the fundamental 
problem of all our knowledge. Each individual 
trait, each individual property, might perhaps 
be explained by the power of heredity and the 
influence of experience ; but the inner unity, to 
which all elements refer, and by virtue of which 
the individuality is a psychical individuality, 
remains for us an eternal riddle. ... It is 
impossible to apply to the mental province any- 
thing analogous to the persistence of energy. 
Psychical individuality is one of the practical 
limits of science.' 



206 APPENDIX 

'The peculiarity of the phenomena of con- 
sciousness, as contrasted with the subject-matter 
of the science of external nature — material 
phenomena — is precisely that inner connexion 
between the individual elements in virtue of 
which they appear as belonging to one and the 
same subject.' 

' Physiology, like every natural science, ex- 
plains a material process by means of other 
material processes. Its assumptions are not 
framed to include a case in which one member 
of the causal relation shall be spatial, the other 
non-spatial.' 

' Mental existence . . . has for its funda- 
mental form, memory, synthesis ; and synthesis 
presupposes individuality. The material world 
shows us no real individualities, these are first 
known to the psychological standpoint, from 
which inner centres of memory, action, and en- 
durance are discovered.' 

' In recognition and in memory is expressed 
an inner unity, to which the material world 
affords no parallel.' (Hoffding, Outlines of 
Psychology, Eng. Trans.) 



/. PERSONAL IDENTITY 207 

These statements are especially noteworthy, 
as coming from an empirical psychologist. 

But it may be urged that though not logically 
demonstrable, the physical analysis of person- 
ality rests on so many analogies as to be highly 
probable. This again cannot be maintained as 
long as the gulf in question remains unbridged. 
For the two sets of facts have nothing in com- 
mon, and no analogy can extend from one re- 
gion to the other. Compare Professor T. H. 
Green : — 

' If the function relative to our consciousness, 
which belongs to neural process, were involved 
in our consciousness in the same way in which 
chemical processes are involved in those of ani- 
mal life, every step gained in our acquaintance 
with this function would also advance our know- 
ledge of consciousness. But it is not so. There 
is no continuance of neural process into our 
consciousness as there is of chemical processes 
into life. Life is indeed more and other than 
chemical changes ; these changes only contrib- 
ute to it in a living organism ; but they do enter 
into it, are ascertainable elements in it. If 
chemistry cannot tell us how the living body is 



208 APPENDIX 

constructed, it yet can tell us of what it is con- 
structed. If we analyze the growth of a tissue, 
or the formation of the blood, into its constitu- 
ent processes, we find at any rate among these 
such as are strictly chemical. It may not be a 
complete account of the origin of animal heat 
to say that it results from the union of oxygen, 
derived through respiration from the atmos- 
phere, with the carbon contained in certain 
food-stuffs ; but there is no doubt that such 
oxidation is a constituent in its production. 
But when we analyze any determination or 
mode of consciousness, we do not come upon 
neural tremors. If we take the physiologist's 
consciousness of the function of the brain, or 
the musician's of a tune which he " carries in 
his head," and inquire what are its constituents, 
what are the conditions which together make it 
what it is, it is with ideas or determinations of 
consciousness that we are left in the last resort. 
Nothing that the physiologist can detect — no 
irritation, no irradiation, or affection of a sensi- 
tive organ — enters into it at all. The rela- 
tions which these terms represent are all of a 
kind absolutely heterogeneous to, and incom- 
patible with, the mutual determination of ideas 



/. PERSONAL IDENTITY 209 

in the unity of consciousness. They all imply 
distinctions of space and time which that unity 
perhaps renders possible, but which it excludes 
from itself.' (Green, Phil. Works, i. 475.) 

And again, — 

1 The sentient organism is not in any proper 
sense the subject of the feelings to which it is 
organic. It is not conscious of them as its 
feelings. If the expression may be pardoned, 
it is not an it for itself at all, but only for us. 
The apparatus of nerve and tissue has no unity 
for itself, but only for us, to whom it presents 
itself as one in virtue of its function. Its 
unity means merely the combined action of 
many elements, in relation to one irresoluble 
effect, viz. feeling. The conversion of succes- 
sive feelings into an experience, on the other 
hand, implies a subject consciously relating 
them to itself, and at once rendering them a 
manifold (which in themselves, as successively 
vanishing, they are not), and unifying this 
manifold by means of that relation. Such a 
subject has or is the unity which, under the 
name of our understanding, enables us to find 
community of function in the elements of the 



2IO APPENDIX 

sentient organism, and which thus renders it, 
derivatively, one for us. To imagine an " evo- 
lution " of the self-conscious subject from the 
gathered experience of the sentient organism — 
an evolution of the unifying agent from that 
which it renders one — is the last form which 
the standing varepov nrporepov of empirical psy- 
chology has assumed.' (Green, Works, i. 466.) 

The first objection therefore to our regarding 
personality as a mere product of the bodily 
organism is, that the attempt to do so involves 
a logical fallacy. But there is a more impor- 
tant metaphysical objection to which Professor 
Green alludes, in the above passages, and which 
it is the especial object of his elaborate criticism 
of the empirical psychology to exhibit. Briefly 
it is, that all knowledge of objects must pre- 
suppose a subject; which cannot therefore be 
derived from the things of whose intelligibility 
it is itself the constitutive condition. This is 
very clearly put by Lotze, in a passage which I 
have quoted elsewhere, but whose importance 
may justify its repetition in the present context. 

1 It has been required of any theory which 
starts without presuppositions and from the 



I. PERSONAL IDENTITY 211 

basis of experience, that in the beginning it 
should speak only of sensations or ideas, with- 
out mentioning the soul to which, it*is said, we 
hasten without justification to ascribe them. I 
should maintain, on the contrary, that such a 
mode of setting out involves a wilful departure 
from that which is actually given in experience. 
A mere sensation without a subject is nowhere 
to be met with as a fact. It is impossible to 
speak of a bare movement without thinking of 
the mass whose movement it is; and it is just as 
impossible to conceive a sensation existing with- 
out the accompanying idea of that which has it 
— or, rather, of that which feels it ; for this also 
is included in the given fact of experience that 
the relation of the feeling subject to its feeling, 
whatever its other characteristics may be, is in 
any case something different from the relation 
of the moved element to its movement. It is 
thus, and thus only, that the sensation is a given 
fact ; and we have no right to abstract from its 
relation to its subject because this relation is 
puzzling, and because we wish to obtain a start- 
ing-point which looks more convenient but is 
utterly unwarranted by experience. . . . Any 
comparison of two ideas, which ends by our 



212 APPENDIX 

finding their contents like or unlike, presup- 
poses the absolutely indivisible unity of that 
which compares them. . . . And so our whole 
inner world of thoughts is built up ; not as a 
mere collection of manifold ideas existing with 
or after one another, but as a world in which 
these individual members are held together and 
arranged by the relating activity of this single 
pervading principle. This then is what we 
mean by the unity of consciousness ; and it is 
this that we regard as the sufficient ground for 
assuming an indivisible soul.' (Metaphysic, 
§ 241.) 

The result of Professor Green's analysis of 
Locke, Hume, Spencer, and Lewis {Philosoph- 
ical Works, vol. i.) is to show that this principle 
cannot be explained away without first being 
tacitly assumed ; or in other words that it is the 
inevitable prius of all knowledge. In brief he 
says : — 

'The one consciousness, equally present to, 
yet distinguishing itself from, successive feel- 
ings, without which there could be no such 
synthesis of them as is necessary to a recogni- 
tion of their difference in kind and degree, and 



/. PERSONAL IDENTITY 213 

to their constituting a consciousness of change, 
is first taken for granted and then represented 
as resulting from the synthesis which presup- 
poses it It must be presupposed, in order to 
the possibility of feelings being held together 
as related by the subject which experiences 
them, and except as so held together they give 
no " materials for its establishment." ' 

One more statement of the case may be 
quoted, for its clearness, from Mr. D' Arcy : — 

1 Self-consciousness consists not merely in 
having feelings or thoughts, but in that con- 
sciousness which becomes explicit in the recog- 
nition of a feeling as " my " feeling, a thought 
as "my" thought, a book as the book which 
" I " see or touch or read. Self-consciousness 
is the strange power which the mind possesses 
of objectifying itself. It is implicit in all ex- 
perience ; for, otherwise, experience is impossi- 
ble. The unifying agency of the self, by which 
it passes from self to not-self and from every 
element in the not-self to every other element 
and combines all in one, is essentially the 
agency of self -consciousness. The subject is a 
unifying principle only in so far as it is self- 



214 APPENDIX 

conscious, i. e. in so far as it is able to rise 
above itself and its own opposition to the 
object. The objectified self is therefore no 
" group of mental states which form a perma- 
nent nucleus in the mental history." (Alexan- 
der, Moral Order arid Progress, p. 75.) No 
group of mental states could ever form a self in 
any but an improper (or derivative) sense of 
the term, for every group needs the self to con- 
stitute it, and in the very act of constituting it 
the self must be already implicitly self-conscious 
or the act could never take place. Self-con- 
sciousness is presupposed in the very formation 
of this so-called " empirical self." This em- 
pirical self is no more properly called "the self" 
than the body is properly called "the person." ' 
(D'Arcy, Short Study of Ethics, p. 12.) 

The difficulty that is often experienced in 
realizing the cogency of this reasoning arises 
simply from the fact of its being metaphysi- 
cal. And some writers and thinkers have 
endeavoured accordingly to supplement it by 
empirical evidence drawn from the phenomena 
of sleep, somnambulism, trance, and abnormal 
1 psychical ' manifestations, and indicating the 
existence of a self or soul that is independent 



/. PERSONAL IDENTITY 215 

of the bodily organism. But this is an argu- 
ment whose weight must, after all, be inevitably 
confined to those who have had sufficient ex- 
perience of the evidence in question to be con- 
vinced by it. And though it may be useful as 
a counterblast to empiricism on the opposite 
side, it does not possess the rigorous necessity 
of metaphysical demonstration. For the point 
is essentially a metaphysical one — and its 
proper proof therefore is metaphysical. I can 
only use my faculties as I do, because I am a 
self-conscious being ; and their use can neither 
create nor exhibit what is the necessary presup- 
position of their use ; any more than my senses 
can create or exhibit, in the act and moment of 
my using them, the nervous mechanism on 
which they depend. 

For a full treatment of the question, see 
Green ( Works ', vol. i.), and for a further criticism 
of some recent writers, Ladd {Philosophy of 
Mind). 

But it is in the moral region, as stated in the 
text, that our personal identity becomes most 
plain. Self-consciousness indeed is the neces- 
sary presupposition of self-determination, and 
therefore of morality, but it is in the concrete 



216 APPENDIX 

form of moral conduct that it is most easily 
recognized by the majority of men. I am con- 
scious of being morally responsible for what 
I remember doing ten, twenty, thirty, forty 
years ago. I am certain that I am the same 
person who at those dates made a free choice 
between good and evil, and both this identity 
and this freedom place me in a category which 
— if the term nature is to be used as synony- 
mous with the realm of physical causation — 
must be termed supernatural. This again is a 
point which has been elaborately demonstrated 
by Professor Green in his Prolegomena to 
Ethics: and that it should be regarded by the 
empirical psychologists as an illusion (Hoff- 
ding, vii. B. 4) need not in any way disturb us, 
as this inevitably follows from their failure to 
recognize the true nature of the self-conscious- 
ness upon which it depends. 

This permanent self then, which is the sub- 
ject of all our thoughts, and which we know 
by self-consciousness, and can know in no other 
way, is the basis of our personality, in the 
sense of being that which makes us persons. 
It is not our entire personality, when person- 
ality is used in the sense of concrete character, 



/. PERSONAL IDENTITY 217 

any more than the seed is the full-blown flower; 
but it is that which makes the development of 
our concrete character possible. And it would 
contribute to clearness of thought, if the term 
' personality ' were reserved to denote the 
quality of being a person, or self-conscious 
subject; while 'mood' and 'character' are used 
to designate the particular state or kind of 
person. In popular language, for instance, 
we speak of a person in different moods of 
joy and sorrow as being quite a different per- 
son, but when Mr. Ribot does this in a scien- 
tific treatise, the result is destructive of all 
accurate thought. 

A concrete person then, as he knows him- 
self from within, is a self-conscious subject 
with a certain character existing in connexion 
with a bodily organism. And though the 
bodily organism provides material for the for- 
mation of the character, it does not constitute it. 
A man is not the result of his bodily organism, 
but of the way in which he has reacted on his 
bodily organism; in other words, of his will. 
The body has its appetites, its instincts, its 
hereditary tendencies, its idiosyncrasies of dis- 
position and temperament, its nerves and cere- 



2l8 APPENDIX 

bral impressions. But a man's character does 
not depend upon the mere existence of these 
things, but upon the use made of them; the 
way in which some have been selected for 
encouragement, and others have been sup- 
pressed ; the particular portion of the total 
potentiality which has been voluntarily realized. 
And though it is quite true, of course, that there 
attach to every man a number of minor charac- 
teristics, which help to constitute his individu- 
ality, and yet have never been made objects 
of will, these are essentially subordinate to, 
and qualified by, the central character, which 
the man has fashioned for himself. Now the 
fashioning of character is a moral process. If 
a man makes no effort at self-control, but fol- 
lows the impulse of the moment, his charac- 
ter becomes unstable, incoherent, inconsistent, 
irregular, and in the strict sense of the word, 
dissolute ; for its elements are dissolved, and 
have no cohesion or consistence of any kind ; 
it is not a unity, but an aggregate of states. 
If, on the other hand, a man pursues a high 
ideal, and pursues it with consistency, he learns 
by degrees to subordinate his inordinate im- 
pulses and instincts ; to concentrate his atten- 



/. PERSONAL IDENTITY 219 

tion on one object; to direct his actions to 
one end; to intensify, and simplify, and unify 
his life. Thus his metaphysical unity of person 
is realized in moral unity of character, and he 
is in harmony with himself. Between these 
two extremes all human character moves ; as 
a rule neither entirely uncontrolled, nor com- 
pletely self-determined; the flesh lusting against 
the spirit, as St. Paul describes it ; the chariot- 
eer, in Plato's simile, struggling with unequal 
steeds. 

Now of the various and often discordant 
elements which appear in consciousness, it is 
only those which have been made objects of 
will, and so brought into connexion with our 
moral being, that we strictly consider parts of 
ourself. No one, for example, feels responsible 
for the actions of his dreams, because they are 
not under the control of the will ; and it is pre- 
cisely the same, in our waking moments, with 
the various sensations and suggestions to which 
our bodily organism, or the outer world, give 
rise. They may all be called our own, in the 
sense of happening to us as distinct from an- 
other person. But they are not parts of our 
self till we have made them so by voluntary 



220 APPENDIX 

acceptance. The bad man is so, not because 
he is aware of bad impulses, but because he 
acts upon them ; while by the effort of resisting 
the very same impulses, of which he may be 
equally aware, the good man becomes good. 
And thus there is a great deal of truth in the 
popular use of language which speaks of a good 
man as a man of character, and of a bad man 
as a man of no character. For the good man 
actually has more character to the extent that 
he has exercised his will, while the bad man is, 
as we often say, 'not himself,' but the creature 
of impulse, or the creature of circumstance ; 
the sport and plaything of external forces — 
less like a person than like a thing. Yet this 
man all the while is, metaphysically speaking, a 
self or self-conscious being, and as such can 
distinguish himself in thought from the influ- 
ences which he has lost the power to resist, 
with consequent feelings which range from self- 
pity through self-contempt to the deepest re- 
morse. And in the many cases where moral 
error has gone so far as to unhinge the mind, 
the interior discord may easily give rise to such 
a sense of plural personality, as was expressed 
in the words ' my name is legion, for we are 



/. PERSONAL IDENTITY 221 

many.' It may be noticed, for instance, that 
the strongest cases of ' plural personality ' 
quoted by the physiologists are those whose 
antecedents have been profoundly immoral. 

It is perfectly true therefore that our unity 
of character is a thing of gradual development, 
wrought out of infinitely complex elements, and 
varying in degree ; and physiological psychol- 
ogy throws much interesting light upon the 
material conditions of its formation. But the 
whole process is only possible in virtue of 
that self-conscious personality, which has no 
physiological analogue and can only be known 
from within. This self-conscious personality is, 
indeed, only known to us in connexion with 
a bodily organism, and totally disappears at 
its dissolution. But what then disappears, it 
must be remembered, is not merely our self- 
consciousness, but the concrete character which 
that self-consciousness, in its association with 
the body, has gradually formed, the moralized 
or demoralized self. Death is an episode in 
a moral as well as a physical life, and as such 
must be morally and therefore teleologically 
regarded. We are thus led to qualify what 
the senses perceive in it by what the con- 



2 22 APPENDIX 

science demands ; a continuation of that moral 
history which in this life is incomplete. And 
the same moral consciousness which assures 
us of our personal identity leads us to an- 
ticipate its continued existence. Thus the 
beginning and end of personal identity is 
metaphysical and moral, and morbid pathol- 
ogy does not affect it. For the fact that its 
manifestation is obscured by certain diseases 
is only part of the wider fact that it disap- 
pears at death ; and if the latter fact does 
not disconcert our belief, neither need the 
former. Indeed, both Hoffding and Ribot, 
whom we have quoted above, admit, though 
it may be thought at the cost of their consist- 
ency, that there may be a deeper point of 
view than the physiological. 

1 We note, incidentally, that the theory main- 
tained here, although materialistic in form, can 
be adapted to any metaphysics. We essay to 
reduce conscious personality to its immediate 
conditions — the organism. As regards the 
final conditions of those conditions, we have 
nothing to say.' (Ribot, Diseases of Person- 
ality, p. 154.) 



I. PERSONAL IDENTITY 223 

'The empirical formula, with which we here 
end, does not exclude a more comprehensive 
metaphysical hypothesis. . . . On the con- 
trary, the theory of knowledge leads us to 
regard the phenomena of consciousness as 
the most fundamental facts in our experience, 
since, looked at logically, the subjective point 
of view is deeper than the objective. From 
this point of view the most natural conception 
is that which regards the mental life as the 
essential, and the corresponding cerebral ac- 
tivity as the form in which it is manifested 
to sensuous intuition.' (Hoffding, Outlines of 
Psychology, ii. 8 d.) 

Much valuable sifting of the conception of 
self will be found in Mr. Bradley's Appearance 
and Reality, where he very truly remarks that 
1 in personal identity the main point is to fix the 
meaning of person, and it is chiefly because our 
ideas as to this are confused that we are unable 
to come to a further result' And though the 
general tendency of his criticism is at first sight 
destructive, he admits that ' self-sameness exists 
as a fact, and hence somehow an identical self 
must be real.' Moreover, it should be noticed 



224 APPENDIX 

that many of the difficulties which he raises, in 
connexion with this real self, arise from the 
peculiar canon of reality that he adopts, mak- 
ing it impossible to predicate reality of anything 
but the Absolute or God — ens realissirnum ; 
which in a sense, of course, is perfectly true. 
But if we are content to recognize degrees of 
reality, we may fairly call the self, as above 
described, the most real thing that we know, 
though fully admitting that its reality is and 
must be derivative and dependent upon God; 
while of persons, as they exist in the concrete, 
those who are most moral, and therefore con- 
sciously or unconsciously most united to God, 
are, as we have seen, the most real, and inti- 
mately one ; whereas those who are immoral, 
and to that extent alienated in will from God, 
are unreal and discordant, to a degree that 
raises a question in our mind, at times, whether 
dissoluteness may not end in dissolution, and 
the self that has failed to justify its existence 
cease to exist. 

Briefly to resume then : there is — 
I. A logical fallacy involved in the attempt 
to resolve the personal identity of which we are 
immediately conscious into elements which are 



7. PERSONAL IDENTITY 225 

only empirically known, — a fallacy which no 
amount of increase in our empirical knowledge 
can in the slightest degree affect. 

2. Positive metaphysical proof of our per- 
sonal identity : proof which, though metaphysi- 
cal, is in no way remote from common sense, 
being simply the justification, by philosophical 
analysis, of what common sense asserts. 

3. Moral evidence, which is still more obvi- 
ous, of the same ; and which consists in (a) our 
sense of responsibility, (/3) our demand of im- 
mortality. 

And when asked wherein this identity con- 
sists, we may be content to reply with Lotze, 
' Every soul is what it shows itself to be, unity, 
whose life is in definite ideas, feeling, and efforts.' 
In other words, we do not attempt to explain this 
unity — we merely assert that it exists, and that 
the efforts of physiology to account for it are 
transparently inadequate. There is always a 
materialistic tendency abroad in the world, and 
each new science is pressed into its service in 
turn. But, as a matter of fact, physiological 
psychology no more makes for materialism 
than astronomy, or any of the older sciences 
which were once thought so to do. Tennyson 
Q 



226 APPENDIX 

spoke as a philosopher, and not merely as a 
poet, when he said in words with which we are 
now familiar : ' You may tell me that my hand 
and my foot are only imaginary symbols of 
my existence, I could believe you ; but you 
never, never can convince me that the / is not 
an eternal Reality, and that the spiritual is not 
the true and real part of me.' {Life, ii. p. 90.) 



II. FREEWILL 

SOME passages from various writers on the 
subject of freewill, will be found in a note 
to my lectures on Personality (p. 227); col- 
lected partly to show how strong a consensus 
of opinion there is upon the point, among 
writers of very various schools, and partly to 
emphasize the identity of doctrine contained 
in their different phraseology. But here, too, 
as in the case of self-identity, we are met with 
objections drawn from physiological psychol- 
ogy, which may justify a few further remarks 
upon the subject. 

In the first place, one must recall the fact 
that freewill (like personal identity, of which 
it is a function) is defended on grounds of 
experience, and denied on grounds of ante- 
cedent improbability. As Dr. Johnson once 
put it when irritated with the argument, 'all 
theory is against freewill, but all experience is 
227 



228 APPENDIX 

in its favour.' This is important to notice, be- 
cause it is the exact converse of what is often 
supposed to be the case, and of what has 
always been the case, whenever physical sci- 
ence has permanently altered popular opinion. 
For science is based upon facts of experience, 
and when in conflict with popular prejudice 
the whole secret of its success has always lain 
in its power of appeal to those facts. But in 
the present instance this is not the case. The 
consciousness of freedom is a fact of practically 
universal experience; not of reported experi- 
ence in the past, but of present and past 
experience alike. While its opponents ground 
their opposition, not upon a refutation of the 
fact, nor even upon its inconsistency with other 
facts, but upon its inconsistency with a theory 
which they have drawn from other facts, and 
can only so draw by previously ruling the fact 
in question out of court. In other words, they 
beg the question, and offer presumption instead 
of proof. And such a procedure, though due 
to the influence of scientific prepossession over 
certain minds, is radically unscientific and must 
not be allowed to plead the authority of science 
in its behalf. 



//. FREEWILL 229 

' Surely the universal conviction of all man- 
kind, not merely felt but practically adopted 
in every action of the whole life of every indi- 
vidual, even by the philosophers who deny its 
existence, must be allowed to count for a great 
deal in a controversy of opposing probabilities, 
for it must be clearly understood that the argu- 
ment extends to nothing more than probability. 
The opponents of freedom of the will do not 
pretend to prove by the evidence of facts that 
this freedom does not exist, but only that it is 
highly improbable, because it is, as they con- 
tend, inconsistent with some other accepted 
theories.' (Cox, Mechanism of Man, i. p. 399.) 

Then, after all that has been said upon the 
question, there is still a great deal of miscon- 
ception as to what is meant by freewill. Every 
one knows that it neither means a motiveless 
nor a limitless will ; and yet on both points 
there is still a great deal of confusion. 

In the first place it is not motiveless, and to 
make this clear, the word self-determination is 
now used. But this term, in its turn, has given 
rise to misunderstanding, in consequence of its 
being appropriated by necessitarians, and ut- 



230 APPENDIX 

terly distorted from its original sense. It is 
universally agreed that human conduct is de- 
termined by motives; and the only question 
is whence those motives are derived. Self-de- 
termination means the power of choosing 
the motive by which our action shall be deter- 
mined, and thus in the last resort of determin- 
ing our conduct of our own accord, or as the 
phrase says, determining ourselves. Its possi- 
bility depends upon our being self-conscious. 
For because we are self-conscious, we can dis- 
tinguish our ' self ' not only from the external 
world, but from all the various thoughts which 
come into our minds. We can hold them at 
arm's length, as it were, and contemplate them 
as objects which, though present to our imagi- 
nation, are distinct from our self. Now among 
these thoughts which come into the mind are 
a certain number which arouse our desires, and 
therefore appeal to us as motives ; urging us to 
act or to forbear. But we can treat these pre- 
cisely like all other thoughts ; we can stand free 
from them ; we can contemplate them ab extra. 
And then we can choose from among them 
which we will elect to follow. And it is at this 
point that we are aware of being free. At the 



//. FREEWILL 231 

moment of action we undoubtedly follow what 
is then the strongest motive — but it does not 
become the strongest till we have made it so by 
our previous act of choice ; and that act of 
choice is an act of pure self-assertion. I will 
make this my motive. / will identify myself 
with this. Self-determination therefore is 
simply a more accurately descriptive name for 
what is commonly called freewill ; and its ac- 
cent, so to speak, is upon the ' self.' But 
various necessitarians have caught it up and 
changed its accent on to the ' determination.' 
Self-determination, they say, means the fact 
of being determined by self, used as a synonym 
for character ; and is thus only a particular 
form of determinism ; human conduct being 
as necessarily determined by character as ma- 
terial motion by external force. Now this is 
exactly what the phrase in question does not 
mean, and was never meant to mean by those 
who introduced its use. 

Self as synonymous with person, or self-con- 
scious subject, as such> is quite distinct from 
self as synonymous with character, or devel- 
oped personality, as we have had occasion to 
point out in the previous note ; and it is in the 



232 APPENDIX 

former sense, and not the latter, that the word 
is used in the phrase self-determination. It de- 
notes the power that we possess, as self-con- 
scious beings, of selecting our own motives, 
and so determining our conduct, and through 
our conduct our character. Of course we have 
the rudiments of a character, in the shape of 
disposition and temperament, to start with ; and 
as this character grows, its influence on our 
conduct increases. But so far is this influence 
from being equivalent to self-determination in 
the proper sense of the term, that we may say 
with strict accuracy that, in proportion as our 
character determines us, we are not self-deter- 
mined ; we do not act as selves, consciously 
using our power of choice. It is quite true, 
and a very important truth, that our character, 
as time goes on, becomes the summary and 
register of all our previous acts of choice ; and 
thus expresses our dominant bent, and con- 
tinues to act automatically, in all the ordinary 
circumstances of life — just as we write or play 
music without thinking of the letters or the 
notes. But though this action is practically 
automatic, we are conscious of being able, by 
a sufficient effort, to counteract it ; and it is 



II. FREEWILL 233 

only because we adopt it by acquiescence, that 
is by a fresh act of mental self-determination, 
that we regard it and expect it to be regarded 
as truly our own. Self-determination then is 
only another name for freewill. But it is a 
more accurate name, for it implies the necessity 
of motives, as against mere indeterminism, or 
liberty of indifference ; while it reminds us that 
those motives are not mere desires, but objects 
of thought to a self-conscious subject, who, 
as such, can distinguish himself from them, 
and freely decide or decline to make them his 
own. 

The whole process is well described, in some- 
what different phraseology, by Professor Case, 
and the difference of phrase may further em- 
phasize the point : — 

1 Old-fashioned as it may now appear, the 
moral commonplace which tells us to govern 
our passions by our reason, is the real solution 
of the freedom of the will; and it is worthy 
of remark, that everybody remembers this 
power of the intellect when speaking of virtue, 
and yet most moralists forget it when they 
are discussing the will. The real question is, 



234 APPENDIX 

whether the will is independent of the strong- 
est desire, and whether it can choose to follow 
it or not. The answer is, that the will is free 
from desire by determining to do what the 
intellect after deliberation declares to be good, 
and that it can without reference to the strength 
of the desire choose to follow it or not, — to 
follow it, if the intellect declares the object to 
be good, to reject it, if the intellect declares 
the object to be evil. . . . The will is neither 
the child of desire, nor unbegotten, but is the 
child of the intellect. Though it be true that 
intellect by itself does not cause action, yet a 
conception of good in the intellect does cause 
a volition of good in the will, and is thus 
through the medium of the will an ultimate 
cause of action. We control our desires by 
our will, and our will by our intellect, or by 
what Butler called " a capacity of reflecting 
upon actions and characters, and making them 
an object to our thought." Will then may be 
denned as the determination to do what the 
intellect concludes to be good after delibera- 
tion. . . . Even if I have not enumerated all 
the constituents of a free will, I have at least 
disproved the Necessarian theory, that a man 



77. FREEWILL 235 

always acts from his " desires, aversions, habits, 
and dispositions, combined with outward cir- 
cumstances," by proving that he sometimes de- 
liberates about the objects of all these motives, 
and determines to follow them only so far as 
he judges them to be good. The mere exist- 
ence of the deliberative intellect is sufficient 
to disprove Necessarianism.' (Case, Realism 
in Morals, pp. 16, 19, 24.) 

It may be interesting to compare this with 
the concise language in which St. Thomas ex- 
pressed the same doctrine six centuries ago : — 

'Intellectus movet voluntatem finaliter, quia 
bonum intellectum est objectum movens volun- 
tatem ut finis.' {Sum. 1. 82. 4.) 

So far then on the meaning of the phrase 
self-determination. The evidence for the fact 
of it — the fact that we are free to choose 
between opposing motives — I have attempted 
briefly to summarize in my lectures on Person- 
ality, with further reference in the notes to 
more authoritative writers, who have treated the 
subject at greater length. Briefly the evidence 
consists in our consciousness at the moment, 



236 APPENDIX 

confirmed by our subsequent approval or dis- 
approval of the choice. This verdict of con- 
sciousness can only be set aside by the arbitrary 
assertion that it is (and has been from the dawn 
of history) an illusion or delusion (both terms 
are used); and to support this assertion, two 
further assertions, of an equally arbitrary 
nature, are generally made. 

1. That we think we could have chosen dif- 
ferently in the past, because on looking back at 
a later date, and with an altered character, we 
feel that this altered character would have made 
a different choice. And on this two remarks 
may suffice. Firstly, on the necessitarian hy- 
pothesis that one choice inevitably leads to the 
next, the character could by no conceivable 
possibility be so altered as to condemn any of 
its previous decisions, since it would still be 
moving on the lines which they involved. 
Secondly, it is not in retrospect, but at the 
moment of choosing that we are most keenly 
conscious of our freedom to choose — as when 
every fibre of our moral being is strained almost 
to breaking in the agonizing effort of the choice. 
The subsequent review of a wrong act is, indeed, 
very far from assuring us that we should have 



//. FREEWILL 237 

courage to act differently now, as in the case of 
Sir Walter Scott's Hannah Irwin, quoted by- 
Schopenhauer in his favour : what it does 
assure us is that we ought to have acted differ- 
ently then; and that is precisely what we re- 
member feeling at the time, and what convinced 
us then, that we were free. 

2. The other assertion is that, as a body 
which is moved by forces would, if endowed 
with consciousness, think that it moved of itself, 
because it followed the strongest force, that is, 
the force which appealed to it most, so human 
beings imagine themselves free simply because 
they are conscious, ,and therefore aware of 
acquiescing in the motive that determines them, 
or wishing what they do. But, as a matter of 
fact, our consciousness of freedom does not con- 
sist in the mere sense of wishing what we do, 
but in the contemporaneous sense that we could 
wish or will otherwise if we chose. We know 
very well what it is to be conscious spectators of 
our own automatic activities, for it is a familiar 
experience of everyday life; but we know, at 
the same time, that this kind of consciousness 
differs, toto caelo, from our attitude toward acts 
of will. Yet the statement in question asserts 



238 APPENDIX 

the two things to be identical. It would really 
seem therefore to be due to confusion — a rather 
serious confusion — between physical and moral 
freedom, the freedom of unimpeded, and that 
of voluntary action. A stone discharged from a 
catapult, if it suddenly became conscious, would 
doubtless feel its movement free, in the sense of 
unimpeded ; but what it emphatically would not 
feel would be power to change its direction at 
will. Yet this latter is what we mean by moral 
freedom ; and the hypothetical analogy in ques- 
tion, therefore, does not touch it, for it only 
applies to physical or unimpeded, not to moral 
or voluntary freedom. Hence the supposed 
delusion of the latter remains precisely where it 
was before, except that one more attempt to 
explain it conspicuously fails. 

The same is the case with all attempts to 
explain the sense of freedom as illusory. They 
are hypotheses, and from the nature of the case 
unverifiable hypotheses, invented to justify a 
foregone conclusion. Freedom must be an illu- 
sion because it ought to be an illusion, is the sum 
total of the necessitarian position, when stripped 
of all disguise. And it ought to be an illusion, 
because otherwise it would conflict with the 



II FREEWIIL 239 

reign of law ; or more specifically, with the doc- 
trine of the persistence of energy ; in accordance 
with which we are assured, 'a physical move- 
ment does not change its direction except under 
the influence of a physical force,' and there is 
consequently no room for freewill to intervene. 
An illustration will perhaps better enable us 
to appreciate the case. A financier receives his 
letters, and, after turning their contents over in 
his mind, telegraphs his business instructions 
to various quarters of the world. Or, a woman 
is seated at the piano, and a friend asks her to 
play. She thinks over his favourite melodies, 
or considers his present state of mind, and 
chooses a particular sonata of Beethoven as the 
result. Or, again, news is brought to a general 
of an enemy's movement ; he plans how to meet 
it, and selects a special regiment for the work. 
No.w, in each of these cases, we have physical 
antecedents, followed by physical consequences. 
But at a point between the two the human will 
has intervened, and determined the entire char- 
acter of the consequences. Other instructions 
might have been given, other music played, 
other men sent to risk their lives, and endless 
differences resulted in the subsequent condition 



240 APPENDIX 

of the external world. Human deliberation has 
entered as a modifying factor into a series of 
otherwise physical events, and determined their 
direction by a conscious act of will. The physi- 
cal movements do not simply pass into the 
darkness of the brain, and thence after a while 
reissue in a definite direction : they report them- 
selves in the full light of consciousness, and are 
discussed and debated in that light; and it is 
exclusively in consequence of what takes place 
within the sphere of consciousness that they 
reissue as they do. We have therefore the 
clearest, the most immediate, the most intimate 
evidence possible, that our will does, as a fact, 
direct physical energy. 

When, with this in mind, we turn to the state- 
ment that 'physical movements do not change 
their direction except under the influence of a 
physical force,' we see more clearly to what it 
amounts. It seems as if it were merely an 
' universal affirmative ' in physics ; but, when 
used against freewill, it is illegitimately ex- 
tended into a ' universal negative ' in metaphys- 
ics ; and ' universal negatives,' as we know, are 
dangerous to deal with, even in an appropriate 
sphere. The utmost that the physicist can 



//. FREEWILL 241 

possibly assert is that within the physical 
region, which is equivalent to saying in the 
physical region viewed from the physical side, 
the law in question holds good. But if there is 
a power outside the physical region, and there- 
fore wholly inappreciable by physical instru- 
ments or methods of inquiry, it is obvious that 
the physicist as such knows neither what it can 
or cannot do. And that there is such a power, 
the universal experience of mankind, confirmed 
by the verdict of critical philosophy, asserts 
with an emphasis on which, by this time, it is 
wholly superfluous to enlarge. As Dr. Johnson 
said, ' we know that we are free, and there's an 
end of it.' 

We have here, therefore, a metaphysical fact 
of simply incalculable weight, the universal 
testimony of human consciousness, to what 
goes on within itself, as against a physical 
hypothesis, which by its nature can never be 
universally verified, and least of all in the very 
region where its verification would be to the 
point — that is, the living human brain. At 
the present moment, for instance, we are 
assured that, ' The relation between nerve-fibres 
and nerve-cells is very obscure; the physical 



242 APPENDIX 

properties of the ganglia-cells, and consequently 
the physical origin of the simplest reflex move- 
ment, are not yet understood; it is not even 
quite certain that the ganglia-cells form the 
connecting-link between the afferent and effer- 
ent nerve-fibres. Nor has it been possible to 
point out the anatomical connexion between the 
centres of the centripetal and those of the cen- 
trifugal nerves in the spinal cord.' (Hoffding.) 
But let us suppose that all these obscurities 
have been cleared up by the science of the 
future, and that the whole mechanism of ner- 
vous action can be traced. The verification in 
question would still be no nearer than before. 
For even if we could see the continuous action 
of a living human brain (a considerable con- 
cession to the science of the future), we could 
not tell whether its accompanying consciousness 
was, or was not, a condition of what we saw. 
For, as Tyndall characteristically put it, we 
have not the necessary organ, nor the rudi- 
ments of such an organ. There might be no 
visible breach of continuity, and yet the whole 
process might be spiritually qualified ; much as 
a living organism qualifies the mechanical 
properties of its constituent molecules. 



//. FREEWILL 243 

It is of course obvious to reply that we cannot 
logically draw a distinction between the charac- 
ter of movements which are equally physical 
whether inside or outside the brain. If physi- 
cal antecedents, without any spiritual coefficient, 
invariably determine the latter, what right have 
we to suppose that the former are in different 
case ? When this objection is made by a pure 
materialist we can only refer him back to those 
ultimate considerations before which we believe 
that materialism breaks down. But if it is urged, 
as is often the case, by those who admit the exist- 
ence of spirit in the universe, we reply that in 
that case all physical movement must be con- 
ceived to have a spiritual coefficient, as we have 
argued at length in the text. But if all physi- 
cal movement has a divine spiritual coefficient, 
or condition, which is only unobserved because 
its normal action is uniform, there is nothing 
illogical, or even improbable, in supposing that 
the movements of the brain are specially condi- 
tioned or controlled by the spirit of man. 
Moreover it must be remembered that, after all, 
human personality is, within our experience, 
unique : to argue therefore that what does not 
happen elsewhere is not likely to happen in the 



244 APPENDIX 

human brain is by no means so logical a pro- 
ceeding as at first sight it may seem. For 
granting that the human brain when considered 
by itself is like any other 'parcel of matter,' 
yet in actual fact it only exists in combination 
with a unique phenomenon, a phenomenon 
which has no parallel within the range of our 
experience ; and it is a mere commonplace to 
say that we cannot infer from what happens 
under one set of conditions, what will happen 
under another set of conditions, which are not 
only different, but as different as we can possi- 
bly conceive. Thus it still remains a case of 
metaphysical fact versus physical presumption ; 
and the more the presumption is analyzed the 
less reasonable is it found to be. 

We may fitly conclude this aspect of the sub- 
ject with the following quotation from Lotze, 
whose whole treatment of the question should 
be read : — 

1 Admitting the incomparability of things 
physical and material, it would still be an un- 
founded prejudice to suppose that only like can 
act on like, and a mistake to imagine that the 
case of an interaction of soul and body is an 



//. FREEWILL 245 

exceptional one, and that we are here to find 
inexplicable what in any action of matter upon 
matter we understand. ... To our sensuous 
imagination, it is true, no interaction but that 
of similar elements (similar at least in their ex- 
ternal appearance) presents itself as a connected 
image ; but it is only our sensuous imagination 
that seeks to retain for every case of action the 
homogeneous character which it fancies it under- 
stands to be an essential condition in this par- 
ticular case, and this is just where it deceives 
itself. . . . The working of every machine yet 
known rests on the fact that certain parts of it 
are solid, and that these parts communicate 
their motions ; but how the elements manage to 
bind one another into an unchanging shape, 
and how they can transmit motions — and this 
is what is essential in the process of the action 
of matter on matter — remains invisible, and 
the similarity of the parts concerned in the 
action adds nothing to its intelligibility. When 
then we speak of an action taking place between 
the soul and material elements, all that we miss 
is the perception of that external scenery which 
may make the influence of matter on matter 
more familiar to us, but cannot explain it. We 



246 APPENDIX 

shall never see the last atom of the nerve im- 
pinging on the soul, or the soul upon it ; but 
equally in the case of two visible spheres the 
impact is not the intelligible cause of the com- 
munication of motion ; it is nothing but the form 
in which we can perceive something happening 
which we do not comprehend. The mistake is 
to desire to discover indispensable conditions of 
all action ; and we are only repeating this mis- 
take in another form when we declare the imma- 
terial soul, as devoid of mass, incapable of 
acting mechanically on a dense material mass, 
or conceive it as an invulnerable shadow, inac- 
cessible to the attacks of the corporeal world.' 
(Lotze, MetaphystCy bk. iii. c. 1, p. 436.) 

But while it is essential to emphasize the exist- 
ence of freewill, it is almost as important to 
recognize its practical limitation. For a great 
deal of the obscurity that surrounds the entire 
subject is due to the confusion of these two 
things; the extremely limited nature of our 
freedom giving superficial plausibility to the 
denial of its existence. As a matter of fact 
the power to deviate by a hair's breadth from 
the chain of physical necessity constitutes free- 



//. FREEWILL 247 

dom, as described above, and renders us in con- 
sequence responsible moral agents. And this 
may be called formal, as distinct from material 
or practical freedom ; meaning that it is a form 
which has to impress itself on matter ; a poten- 
tiality (hvvaiusi) which has to be realized, a 
faculty which has to be used, before we can 
be called actually and positively free. We are 
in fact free to become free; free in the first 
sense to become free in the second sense. And 
this process of becoming positively free, or 
realizing our potential freedom, is limited in 
various ways. 

I. We are physically limited by the fact that 
we cannot create, but can only direct physical 
energy. This distinction (which Hoffding calls 
a subterfuge) is in fact a very real and important 
one, for it constitutes the answer to the charge 
that freewill would introduce confusion into the 
order of the world. Of course the power to 
direct is as disturbing as the power to create 
energy at will, in the eyes of any psychologist 
who ever hopes to construct an exact science of 
the human mind; but this hypothetical science 
is the only thing that it disturbs. But otherwise, 
the fact that we can only direct existing energies 



248 APPENDIX 

effectively prevents our disturbing the order of 
the world ; being only the counterpart to Bacon's 
Natura non nisi parendo vincitur. The world 
is full of forces that every moment are chang- 
ing their direction, and human action is confess- 
edly one of the factors in this change. But the 
fact that the action, when regarded from within, 
is free, does not alter the fact that, when regarded 
from without, it is like any other physical ante- 
cedent, which modifies but in no way confuses 
the natural sequence of events. While we are 
deliberating we are free, but do not alter the 
material order ; but as soon as we begin to act 
we enter into that order, and thereby become a 
part of it, and obedient to its laws. Thus free- 
will is prevented by its obvious physical limita- 
tions from disturbing the order of the world, 
and what may be called its truly creative force 
is thereby limited to the sphere of the moral 
character. 

2. But here again it is constitutionally limited, 
for it cannot create ex nihilo ; it can only fash- 
ion those rudiments of character which we 
already possess, in the shape of temperament 
and disposition, talents, tendencies, and taints. 
We are free enough to bring a moral or an 



//. FREEWILL 249 

immoral result out of these elements ; but the 
elements themselves, assisted by the opportuni- 
ties and circumstances of life, will determine 
the particular shape of that result, and the con- 
sequent individuality of the person. Thus we 
are constitutionally free to become good or evil, 
but not to make one hair black or white. We 
can only realize the individuality with which we 
were born. 

3. But, once more, we are morally limited ; 
for this very process of realization becomes a 
further process of limitation in its turn. ' Acts 
form habits,' said Aristotle long ago, ' because,' 
adds the modern physiologist, 'nervous energy 
flows along the line of least resistance,' and 
habits are, of course, limitations ; for the stronger 
a habit becomes, the less able or likely are we 
to counteract it. Habits, therefore, grow upon 
us, good, bad, and indifferent, and ' custom lies 
upon us with a weight ' as life goes on ; and so 
by degrees our character, or habitual mode of 
action, is permanently formed. This character, 
as we have seen above, may still be altered with 
sufficient effort ; but as the effort becomes more 
difficult, it becomes proportionately improbable, 
till, in average cases, the necessitarian conten- 



250 APPENDIX 

tion is practically true, that a man's conduct 
may be predicted from his character, or is, in 
other words, determined by his past. 

Thus our freewill is practically limited in a 
variety of ways ; and it is under cover of these 
limitations, as noticed above, that its existence 
can be so plausibly denied. But as a matter of 
fact neither the physical nor the constitutional 
limits above mentioned affect its essence ; they 
merely circumscribe its range. It is only the 
moral limitation that really affects it, and that 
is its own creation, for the habits that at last 
enslave it were at first the objects of its choice; 
and thus, however much a man's character de- 
termines him, he is always and rightly held 
responsible for the result. 

And this leads us to a further point of view. 
The freewill or power of self-determination 
which we have hitherto considered, is, as above 
stated, a potentiality to be realized, a faculty to 
be used, and its realization is freedom, or the 
state of being free. But the faculty of freewill 
is limited on every side. How then can it at- 
tain to a state of freedom ? Only by making 
the forces, which limit it, its own ; so that they 
cease to be limitations, and become extensions 



//. FREEWILL 251 

of itself. Thus a man may assert his formal 
freewill, by refusing to be controlled, and cross- 
ing a railroad in front of a train. He defies his 
limitations, and immediately loses all freedom 
in death. While conversely by consenting to 
be confined within the train, he extends his 
powers of locomotion to a distance which they 
could never otherwise attain, and to that degree 
enlarges his freedom. By accepting his physi- 
cal limitation, he enlists its energy on his own 
behalf, and changes it from a master into a 
slave. So a criminal asserts his formal freewill 
to contravene the law of the land, and loses his 
liberty in prison ; while the man who obeys the 
law of the land reaps all the fruit of its pro- 
tection, and thereby obtains a far greater free- 
dom than if the law did not exist. In familiar 
phrase, we are not free from the law, but by 
the law ; for to obey the law is to identify our- 
selves with its action, and so to make all its 
power our own. But to obey law is to surrender 
our freewill by an act of freewill. Hence, para- 
doxical as it may sound, freewill (our initial, 
' formal,' potential freewill) exists in order to be 
surrendered, and only by its surrender do we 
become practically free. At the same time it 



252 APPENDIX 

is the power to make this surrender that con- 
stitutes our freedom ; it is only because we can 
choose the law that we can become its agents 
and not its slaves ; and so, though our formal 
freedom is consumed in the using, it is the nec- 
essary condition of our being ultimately free. 
Hence the habits which gradually stereotype 
our repeated acts of choice, while they limit our 
freewill, increase our freedom, in proportion as 
our acts of choice are right. For every region 
of life has its appropriate laws ; and if we dis- 
obey them, and by so doing form habits of dis- 
obedience, they oppress us with increasing 
severity till all our liberty is gone ; while if we 
learn habitually to obey them, they extend our 
power. Healthy habits give us bodily capacity, 
business habits wealth, studious habits learning, 
moral habits virtue, spiritual habits piety; and 
in no case till we have acquired the habits are 
we really free. Thus the larger the number of 
rightly chosen habits that we have acquired, or 
the larger the number of laws that we have 
learned to obey, the more positively free do we 
become, since every fresh law that we make 
our own becomes a fresh instrument for our use ; 
we grow increasingly at home in the world, and 



//. FREEWILL 253 

its forces are increasingly at our command. 
While the very fact that our growth in freedom 
means growth in harmony with the laws of the 
universe, effectually prevents our freewill from 
being an element of confusion in the system of 
things, as some writers and thinkers have sup- 
posed that it needs must be. 

This leads us to a further and final thought. 
The laws of nature are, for theists, synonymous 
with the will of God. Hence in learning to 
obey those laws, we are uniting our will to that 
of God ; and His power becomes our power ; 
'Whose service,' in consequence, 'is perfect 
freedom.' 

' Our wills are ours, we know not how, 
Our wills are ours to make them Thine.' * 

Or, as Tennyson otherwise expressed it in prose, 
1 Man's Freewill is but a bird in a cage ; he can 
stop at the lower perch, or he can mount to a 
higher. Then that which is and knows will en- 
large his cage, give him a higher and a higher 
perch, and at last break off the top of his cage, 
and let him out to be one with the Freewill of 
the Universe.' {Life, i. 318.) 

1 In Memoriam. Introd. 



254 APPENDIX 

1 Primum liberum arbitrium, quod homini da- 
tum est . . . potuit non peccare, sed potuit et 
peccare : hoc autem novissimum eo potentius 
erit, quo peccare non poterit. Verum hoc quoque 
Dei munere, non suae possibilitate naturae. 
Aliud est enim, esse Deum ; aliud participem 
Dei. Deus natura peccare non potest ; parti- 
ceps vero Dei ab illo accipit, ut peccare non 
possit . . . ita primum liberum arbitrium posse 
non peccare, novissimum non posse peccare.' 
(Aug. De Civ. Dei, xxii. 37.) 



THE GOSPEL FOR AN AGE OF DOUBT. 

By HENRY VAN DYKE. 

BEING THE 

YALE LECTURES ON PREACHING, 1896. 
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CHRISTIANITY AND IDEALISM. 

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Part I. Theological; II. Anthropological; III. Sociological. 

" It contains something more than commonly well worth reading. The keynote 
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" The message of a twentieth century man to the twentieth century. President 
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sequence a contribution distinctively to social theology. 

" Readers of the author's luminous articles in magazines will not be surprised to 
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places of theology. The origin of man, the doctrine of original sin, the scope of 
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in the light of the science and thinking and spirit of our day. The author's gift 
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" The dominating idea of Dr. Hyde's book is indicated by its title, ' Outlines of 
Social Theology.' It is not sociology viewed theistically; it is theology viewed 
socially. It does not, like Kidd's ' Social Evolution ' or Drummond's ' Ascent of 
Man,' contribute one notably new and crystallizing thought to a familiar discussion. 
It is rather, as its title indicates, an ' outline.' But it is not a skeleton. It is full 
of life, of blood, of nerves. In it the author reflects, in fresh and vital statements, 
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SOCIAL EVOLUTION. 

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New Edition, revised, with a New Preface. 

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" It is a study of the whole development of humanity in a new light, and 
it is sustained and strong and fresh throughout. ... It is a profound work 
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" Those who wish to follow the Bishop of Durham's advice to his clergy 
— 'to think over the questions of socialism, to discuss them with one an- 
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on this the question of the day. We heartily commend this really valuable 
study to every student of the perplexing problems of socialism." — The 
Churchman. 



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THE YALE LECTURES ON PREACHING, 1893. 

By ROBERT F. HORTON, M.A. 

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HEREDITY AND CHRISTIAN 
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By AMORY H. BRADFORD, D.D. 

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